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 1265 contributions
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 November 2025
Angela Constance
Yes. I believe that that figure comes from the Scottish Prison Service’s annual report; it is around £52,000.
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 November 2025
Angela Constance
I am not—
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 November 2025
Angela Constance
Malcolm Graham of the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service always speaks powerfully on the need for investment in cyber resilience. We also know from Police Scotland’s statistics on recorded crimes that there are now around 14,000 cybercrimes each year. That is around double the number from before the Covid pandemic: about 7,700 cybercrimes were recorded in 2019.
Our justice partners have taken various actions. The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service has had a number of internal audits and structural reviews, with a view to strengthening its cyber resilience. More broadly, earlier this year, Police Scotland set up a cyber and fraud unit, which promotes using a preventative policing model so that the service can be more agile and better co-ordinated.
Just a few weeks ago, I launched the update to our cyber resilience framework, which focuses on not only the public sector but the voluntary sector. The update document, which is entitled “The Strategic Framework for a Cyber Resilient Scotland 2025-2030”, is available for anyone to consult and covers issues such as encouraging people in leadership to position cyber risk assessment and assurance as key priorities.
Resilience needs to be embedded into governance arrangements. That means supporting boards and leadership in their training, including: hammering home that being ready for an incident is imperative; that various tools exist and can be used; that efforts must be made to secure legacy systems; and that when new systems are introduced they must, by default, be secure in their design. Organisations should conduct practice runs for what to do in the event of attacks such as those we have seen happen in public services such as health boards and local authorities.
Another effort on the part of the Scottish Government has been to establish the Scottish cyber co-ordination centre, the aims of which are to improve incident response, recovery and intelligence sharing and to get a much better understanding of cybersecurity maturity, particularly in the public sector. The same applies to the voluntary sector.
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 November 2025
Angela Constance
That is part of the rationale for introducing a Scottish spending review that plans resource for three years and capital for four years. We want to give as much certainty as possible to our partners in justice. That needs to be carefully balanced with the risk that spending plans are disrupted due to events that none of us can predict. I do not think that any of us predicted having to stump up £24 million for an international visit over the summer.
I have looked closely at this, particularly in relation to policing and in the conversations that I have had with the chief constable, and the Scottish Government’s ability to borrow is extremely limited. That is not something that I agree with, and the Government has continued to—
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 November 2025
Angela Constance
I do not know. I will ask.
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 November 2025
Angela Constance
Ms McNeill is right that some of the evidence has been stark—I do not think that anybody would demur from that. I am certainly not in the business of reducing police officers and firefighter numbers or of closing prisons, for the obvious reason that we have an overpopulated prison estate as it stands.
I want to continue the progress that has been made with the investments that have happened thus far, particularly in reform and innovation. I take very seriously all the representations that have been made to me and to the committee. However, I must temper things with a certain reality. It is unlikely that we will be able to give everybody everything that they have asked for, but that does not mean that we will not be in a position to protect the front line, maintain our focus on supporting victims and continue with our journey of reform and innovation.
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 November 2025
Angela Constance
The broader point about reserves is that the money still has to come from somewhere. My observation is that, when health and social care partnerships or local authorities have had substantial reserves, that has not gone down well among politicians or the public more widely, and the Scottish Government is not sitting on reserves.
Criminal Justice Committee (Draft)
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Angela Constance
You may recall the home detention curfew regulations that we took through committee. They were aligned with the previous arrangements for short-term prisoners, and we wanted to align them to the short-term prisoner 40 programme.
Criminal Justice Committee (Draft)
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Angela Constance
Yes. I might ask Ruth Swanson to explain this, because I always make a wee bit of a dog’s dinner of it. Although eligibility for some prisoners kicks in at 15 per cent—and there are exclusions around who is eligible for home detention curfew as well—because of the other requirements and the assessment process, people will actually be further into their sentence. Do you want to explain a wee bit about that, Ruth?
Criminal Justice Committee (Draft)
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Angela Constance
With home detention curfew, as well as being risk assessed, everybody is tagged. There are conditions of release and curfew.