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 754 contributions
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Lorna Slater
That is fine. I probably misunderstood. Thank you for clearing that up.
You adjudicate only on councillors and one other group.
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Lorna Slater
The Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee covers MSPs and lobbyists.
If we are looking at consolidating or restructuring the framework, the adjudication function needs to be separate. That does not necessarily need to be done by a commissioner, though. Maybe the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities could do it. What are your thoughts on that?
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Lorna Slater
I will follow up on that a little, because the committee wants to look at the overall framework. Clearly, we do not have a blank slate, but I think that we need to look at the landscape with fresh eyes, as if we were designing something new, so your suggestion that we would not necessarily end up where we are now if we were starting with a blank slate is interesting. I will take that on board, and we can all think about whether there is a gap in relation to the independence of the process of how our Parliament scrutinises itself. As I said earlier, part of the reason for examining the framework is to find out where there are gaps, so that we can improve the system. It is certainly not solely about affordability, cost and so on: it has also got to be about making sure that it works and that it builds trust in public life.
I hypothesised with Mr Bruce about the formation of a larger body that might be called the office of trust in public life, or something, which might encompass the work of the Standards Commission, the Ethical Standards Commissioner and the Scottish Information Commissioner as well as, possibly, ombudsmen and so on. Can you imagine such a thing? Are those bodies all positioned in the same space in terms of public scrutiny, or are they very disparate?
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Lorna Slater
Brilliant. You also described your advisory function—your more proactive function in relation to the ethics of appointments. Is there anywhere else in public life in general where you feel that an advisory function is missing and would be useful? In looking at the commissioner framework, as well as considering overlaps and whether there are too many commissioners, we are trying to find gaps and where things are missing. It seems to me that, especially in the light of more and more complaints being made, a proactive function in providing advice might be useful. What are we missing?
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Lorna Slater
I will pick into what you said about your role as compared with that of the Standards Commission. You described your role as being an investigatory one in providing evidence, with decisions then being made by the Standards Commission or, for MSP matters, the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee. Is that a sort of pass-through process, with the Standards Commission or the MSP group making a recommendation, or does the information go to different places, depending on who is being investigated?
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Lorna Slater
I am thinking about structure. Let us imagine a larger commissioner body—let us call it the commissioner for public trust—within which you would have ombudsmen, standards and so forth. Is that even feasible, or are the bodies just so different that they are really performing different functions?
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Lorna Slater
That is brilliant. I will go back to the point about combining resources and having things such as a one-stop shop or portal. Are there any issues in relation to affordability or maybe even interaction with regard to sharing office space, websites and even being more physically closely located, or would there be issues in relation to trust in that regard?
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Lorna Slater
Yes—please cover that.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Lorna Slater
I have several questions, so I will put them into two clumps. I am asking questions about the rules in the new regulations on the making up and keeping of the registers. With no requirement for verification or update of the registers, how can accuracy be assured and fraud be prevented? How are out-of-date entries removed, for example when a debt has been paid or a pledge has been sold, and how are the registers updated if a pledge is transferred to a different creditor?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Lorna Slater
It was about keeping the registers up to date in terms of when entries should be removed because a pledge has been sold or a debt has been repaid.