Official Report: search what was said in Parliament
The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
The Official Report search offers lots of different ways to find the information you’re looking for. The search is used as a professional tool by researchers and third-party organisations. It is also used by members of the public who may have less parliamentary awareness. This means it needs to provide the ability to run complex searches, and the ability to browse reports or perform a simple keyword search.
Searching by different views
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
- Report: this is the whole Official Report for a particular meeting of a committee or Parliament
- Item of business: this is each individual agenda item in an Official Report. For example, Portfolio Questions would be the item of business in a Meeting of the Parliament report
- Contribution: this is each time someone has made a spoken contribution to a meeting.
Depending on the kind of search you want to do, one of these views will be the best option. The default view is to show the report for each meeting of Parliament or a committee. For a simple keyword search, the results will be shown by item of business.
Search by MSP
When you choose to search by a particular MSP, the results returned will show each spoken contribution in Parliament or a committee, ordered by date with the most recent contributions first. This will usually return a lot of results, but you can refine your search by keyword, date and/or by meeting (committee or Chamber business).
We’ve chosen to display the entirety of each MSP’s contribution in the search results. This is intended to reduce the number of times that users need to click into an actual report to get the information that they’re looking for, but in some cases it can lead to very short contributions (“Yes.”) or very long ones (Ministerial statements, for example.) We’ll keep this under review and get feedback from users on whether this approach best meets their needs.
Searching by keyword
There are two types of keyword search:
- A keyword search without quotation marks will look for every instance of each word used and rank the results by frequency and proximity. It will also include variants of the keywords using “porter stemming”. This is when the search looks for the “stem” of a word regardless of its ending. So, for example, a search for [salmon farm] will return each instance of “salmon” and each instance of “farm” as well as potentially including results for “farms”, “farmed” and “farming”.
- A keyword search with quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase used. So, for example, a search for “salmon farm” in quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase.
Combining search filters
If you select an MSP’s name from the dropdown menu, and add a phrase in quotation marks to the keyword field, then the search will return only examples of when the MSP said those exact words. You can further refine this search by adding a date range or selecting a particular committee or Meeting of the Parliament.
More complex keyword searches
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
- a search for “salmon farm” AND “Loch Lomond” will return only results which include both exact phrases
- a search for “salmon farm” NOT “Loch Lomond” will return results for “salmon farm” but exclude results which also include “Loch Lomond”
- a search for “salmon farm” OR “Loch Lomond” will return all results for “salmon farm” and all results for “Loch Lomond” regardless of whether they appear together
Searching by date
There are two ways of searching by date.
You can either use the Start date and End date options to run a search across a particular date range. For example, you may know that a particular subject was discussed at some point in the last few weeks and choose a date range to reflect that.
Alternatively, you can use one of the pre-defined date ranges under “Select a time period”. These are:
- Current session (all Official Reports since the current sessions started)
- Last 6 months
- Last 12 months
- each of the previous sessions of Parliament. (Selecting the information icon above the “Select a time period” menu will give you the exact dates for each session.)
- All sessions
- You can also choose to select a custom date range, although adding a Start or End date will mean the search automatically defaults to this option.
If you search by an individual session, the list of MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs and committees will update to show the information that was current at that time.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
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Displaying 859 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 3 February 2026
Patrick Harvie
You could do that by exempting lots of people from paying their taxes.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 3 February 2026
Patrick Harvie
This point follows on from the one that was made about the views of the different organisations that the Government will have engaged with.
I wonder whether it would be helpful, in the interests of transparency, for policy notes such as this to give a very brief summary of the extent to which the Government has been lobbied by vested interests on any of these issues and whether, for example, there was a difference of view between those economically active in the industry and those seeking a policy objective such as sustainable development.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 3 February 2026
Patrick Harvie
Thank you.
Ms Woods talked about waste tourism. Where is the evidence for that? I mentioned earlier a company that we visited in Pumpherston that does not think it is viable to sell even to Edinburgh, which is only a few miles away. Given the cost of loading a lorry with aggregate, putting fuel in it and hiring a driver, and given the time taken to ship it from A to B, I have to ask: where is the elasticity? When does it become uncompetitive relative to south of the border? I just do not see how that argument works if we are talking about an extra £1 or £2, or even a fiver per tonne. In fact, I would not suggest a fiver per tonne, having thought about the impact on customers with regard to the spend on building, local authorities fixing roads and so on.
We have to look at the other side of the equation. Where is the elasticity? I just do not see any argument whatsoever for that. I know that some aggregates are shipped by boat, but what work has the Scottish Government done to look at that, so that, next year—if we have to go through this again—the tax is fixed at the optimal level that benefits Scotland by encouraging investment in renewables while not impacting too adversely on the client base and those who are extracting?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 3 February 2026
Patrick Harvie
It still sounds as though we are talking about dressing up a property investment as a financial investment. What is the purpose of it?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 3 February 2026
Patrick Harvie
Thank you.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 3 February 2026
Patrick Harvie
A lot of that information will, ultimately, be publicly available, but it will take a lot of hunting down, whereas a brief summary in the policy note would give a little bit more transparency and let the Government say who has been pushing in this or that direction.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 3 February 2026
Patrick Harvie
Are you saying that the Government has already considered alternative forms of environmental harm on to which the tax base could be shifted, to ensure that there is sustained revenue in the future? What alternatives have been under consideration?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 3 February 2026
Patrick Harvie
My suggestion was that the Government’s tax strategy should look specifically at environmental taxes, which are, by definition, not intended to be permanent sources of revenue, and shift the tax base from one form of environmental harm to another in order to maximise the benefit and revenue.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 3 February 2026
Patrick Harvie
Okay. There are lots of forms of environmental harm that you could tax.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 3 February 2026
Patrick Harvie
Good morning. I am still a wee bit unclear about the purpose of all this.
I understand from the policy note what the Government’s policy is, but I do not understand why.
Can you explain in simple terms—to someone who, to be frank, had never heard of these mechanisms before I looked at the papers for this meeting—the public value of exempting those particular transactions from a tax that others who are involved in land and building transactions must pay? What would the public get out of that?
