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 893 contributions
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Craig Hoy
Are you saying that, if somebody refused to come to work, disciplinary action would be taken against them?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Craig Hoy
Mr Griffin, that is about headcount. We have also found that there has been a significant increase in the number of top-grade civil servants—500 in the past three years. It is easy to say that your headcount is falling, but the wage bill is rising and the number of senior civil servants is rising significantly. For what reason is that number still rising?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Craig Hoy
Do you have any data on the number of disciplinary cases that have been brought against civil servants who have not complied with the working week or have not responded to an informal arrangement with their line managers?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Craig Hoy
I have two quick final points to ask about, if I may, convener. The number of sick days within the civil service has increased significantly to 77,500, which works out as nine days per full-time equivalent civil servant. Are you concerned about the apparent sick-note culture that is developing in the civil service?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Craig Hoy
Shona Robison has said repeatedly that the decision to pay civil servants more and to have more of them is an “investment”—she used that word. Where has the return on that investment been? Where is the increased productivity in Scottish public services?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Craig Hoy
As the convener alluded earlier, since devolution, the number of jobs in the public sector has grown by 19 per cent but there has been a 98 per cent increase in the civil service, and the headcount has increased by 40 per cent since 2019. Surely that cannot be down to additional devolved issues such as Social Security Scotland. Have you broken the numbers down to see where the real growth has taken place?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Craig Hoy
But what is it now?
10:30Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Craig Hoy
Where it says that a staff member has
“the opportunity to informally deliver work from home”,
I am not entirely sure what that means. Could you recall civil servants back in five days a week under their present employment contracts?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Craig Hoy
It is on a subject that I thought might come up earlier but that did not. We took evidence from several public bodies on the Scottish Government’s no compulsory redundancies policy. All of them said that, although they did not intend to use the option of compulsory redundancy routinely, they saw it as another tool in their toolkit. As we embark on reforming our public service and the civil service, what is your view on potentially adding that tool to your own toolkit, to ensure that you would have the whole panoply of options in front of you?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Craig Hoy
What does it tell you about the culture in the civil service that people are saying that it is an infringement of their human rights to ask them to go to work?