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.
Criathragan Hide all filters
Displaying 6787 contributions
|
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 14 January 2026
Ariane Burgess
That would be great.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 14 January 2026
Ariane Burgess
Thank you. I am trying to bust the jargon, but that is fascinating. Somebody wanting to put in hedgerows but not being able to have gaps and so on goes back to what you talked about, which is that we need to look at all the integrated practices holistically so that they work really well together and actually help us to meet our climate and emissions reduction targets. Thanks for that specific example.
What about agroforestry? Are there any good incentives to get farmers to pursue that yet?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 14 January 2026
Ariane Burgess
I want to pick up on something that Claire Daly was kind of saying. In the previous panel, Nim Kibbler talked about how we need to move away from looking just at cow numbers. I think that she meant that, rather than looking at the cow, we should look at the practices of the herdsman or woman. It is not just about having a cow, but about how you work with a cow. In that earlier evidence session, I mentioned that I had gone to see the work of Jock Gibson in Moray. My sense is that we could be looking at more farmers doing that kind of practice across the whole of Scotland. We could keep a certain number of cattle, and then there is the balancing act of the size of throughput that is required to keep the abattoirs running and all that kind of stuff. Could we be looking at smaller herds in more places? I also guess that she was getting at the holistic aspect of how the cattle or sheep are raised.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 14 January 2026
Ariane Burgess
Do you have a sense, from your work on the farm, what would work?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 14 January 2026
Ariane Burgess
We have already touched on the food system and the need for it to be integrated. The draft plan focuses mainly on agricultural production; it says much less about the wider food system with regard to things such as consumption, waste and dietary changes. From your perspective, does the fact that we are not already talking about those issues as part of the climate change plan represent a gap? It has already been suggested that it does. If so, what kind of policies would help to close that gap?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 14 January 2026
Ariane Burgess
I will pop back in with a supplementary on that specific point. I was surprised to learn from Henry Dimbleby’s UK report on food and the book that came out of it, which was called “Ravenous: How to get ourselves and our planet into shape”, that people would only need to reduce the meat that they ate as part of their normal diet for two days a week in order to reduce emissions. I thought that that was interesting, and I wonder whether you have any thoughts on it.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 14 January 2026
Ariane Burgess
Twice in this meeting so far, we have talked about trees falling, which is a real thing—we see that from storms such as storm Arwen. Do we need to be thinking about taking a more joined-up approach, where we are not looking at the carbon sequestered in a forest, but at the timber that goes into housing, where it cannot fall down?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 14 January 2026
Ariane Burgess
I need a little bit more understanding for this conversation. This is not the question that I was going to ask, but I would like to get a sense of this from Nim Kibbler. You have talked a number of times about resource efficiency. At the very beginning of the evidence session, I noted down your mentioning healthy livestock and local food in that context. Could you unpack what you mean by “resource efficiency” a bit more, so that we can understand it?
You can perhaps also touch on the question that I was going to ask, which follows on from Emma Harper’s questions on opportunities with what could be used as fertiliser. That is also what Donna Smith talked about in discussing how crofters are using seaweed. The seaweed sector in Scotland is growing; it seems to be moving. Does that present a possible opportunity for more natural fertilisers, or does it become too technical?
Anyway—what does “resource efficiency” mean?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 14 January 2026
Ariane Burgess
Okay. I guess that I will just have to go and research it.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 14 January 2026
Ariane Burgess
That would be helpful. It seems to me that that is quite an important part of the conversation, which we need to unpack and understand more.
What about the seaweed? Do we think that it presents a possibility?
