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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
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.
Displaying 2406 contributions
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Stephen Kerr
I accept the cabinet secretary’s point that we do not know how every single penny is going to be spent, and that we have to have trust that the organisations are running their affairs—
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Stephen Kerr
That is not correct; Egypt controls the Rafah crossing.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Stephen Kerr
Do you know how much of the nearly £1.5 million that the Scottish Government has given to trusted partners such as DEC and UNRWA, has been spent and what it has been spent on? Do they come back to you and give you a breakdown? Can you avail us of the information that you have?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Stephen Kerr
For clarification, the cabinet secretary was handed a piece of paper that informed him that Israel was controlling the other side of the Rafah crossing, but, as of the end of January, under the ceasefire arrangements that were agreed with Hamas, the IDF withdrew from the Rafah crossing. The current situation is that the IDF does not control the crossing at Rafah—
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Stephen Kerr
Is that touting?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Stephen Kerr
Touting is not the same as selling. I do not understand—
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Stephen Kerr
We are going a very long way round the houses. I am grateful for the frankness in the cabinet secretary’s reply.
I am sorry, but I have one more question.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Stephen Kerr
The anti-touting measures in the Scottish Government bill are quite limited, are they not? For example, someone could just cross the border and do a bit of touting, because the bill does not extend to the rest of the United Kingdom, obviously.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Stephen Kerr
Do you understand the point that I am making? When it comes to touting, the territorial aspect is irrelevant, because much of it will be done online—
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Stephen Kerr
Therefore, would it not have been better to have taken a United Kingdom-wide view on touting so that a single standard law would have been applied to all parts of the United Kingdom?