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 1140 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Craig Hoy
The question that I asked was what assessment of behavioural change has the Government undertaken? I am not hearing that you have done any.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Craig Hoy
My final question is on the same theme. This weekend, it was revealed that 60,000 people are claiming ADP for anxiety-related conditions. Do you know how many of those 60,000 people are in work and how many are not in work?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fiscal Commission
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Craig Hoy
Back in 2014, Ed Balls put some pressure on George Osborne to give responsibility for auditing manifestos to the Office for Budget Responsibility. I was very sceptical about pulling an independent body into an election campaign. I assume that you would be sceptical about any similar calls in Scotland for that process.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Finance (No 2) Bill
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Craig Hoy
I know that you do not want to talk about how the power might be used in the future, but an issue will arise in relation to the relative differences in the tax bases. The number of buy-to-let properties north of the border will be different from the number south of the border, so there will be the capacity to raise more money in England if it has a bigger buy-to-let sector. Therefore, would it not be prudent for the Scottish Government to work quickly to encourage people into the Scottish buy-to-let market, given that our budget will be exposed if Scotland has a smaller private rented sector—and, therefore, not as much private rental income—relative to the rest of the UK?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Craig Hoy
How much less?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Craig Hoy
I am asking for a simple figure, which you must have, cabinet secretary. If 55 per cent of Scots are going to pay less in tax than people in the rest of the UK, what does that equate to in pounds and pence over the course of a calendar year? It is a simple question.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Craig Hoy
Finally, welfare expenditure is an area where I think savings could be made. By the end of the decade, the welfare bill will be approximately £10 billion. Given that there is a significant amount of public money on the table, what assessment has the Scottish Government undertaken, or will it undertake, of the true overall costs of the benefits framework that you have put in place? What assessment are you making of behavioural change, which would include lost tax receipts when benefits disincentivise work?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Craig Hoy
I have to say that I am struggling a little bit. When the Scottish Fiscal Commission can look at pots of money and say that they are routinely transferred—that is a regular process—why would you want to keep them in one budget portfolio, only to shift them, as you have done in previous years, later in the year, unless there is some element of trying to create some confusion about the underlying picture?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Craig Hoy
If you look at the complexity of the Scottish tax system, it has been built in such a way that it effectively allows you to make that claim. It is barely worth the paper that the press release was written on. The figure is £32 a year. When I described the budget as cynical, that is the kind of example that I was alluding to. Why was it fair for you, in the budget, to increase benefits in line with inflation but not the upper rates of the tax thresholds?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fiscal Commission
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Craig Hoy
Much of what I was going to ask about has already been covered, but I have one question about your engagement with the media. The media is a necessary evil for all of us, and I say that as somebody who was once a journalist. Given your impartiality and, as you referred to earlier, your risk aversion, how do you codify your media engagement? Do you not want to put the head in the lion’s mouth too often?
