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 1359 contributions
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
We have no plans to do that specifically, but we are cognisant of the need for people to understand the system. Making sure that people understand the system—there is work emanating from the tax strategy to help to do that—will ensure greater levels of compliance. There will be higher levels of compliance if people understand their obligations and how the system works. That is definitely a major pillar of the tax strategy and the work that is being taken forward to help people to comply with their tax obligations.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
The First Minister said that a range of options was available to the chancellor. Everyone accepts that, but she chose not to take those options but instead to hike employer national insurance contributions. That is something that you have just said you think is problematic, so I presume that you would have liked the chancellor to use another option and that you think that something else should have been done.
A range of options were open to the chancellor and could have resulted in a better outcome than the one that we have. That is the position. No one supports a reduction in funding for Scottish public services.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
Do you mean if we were making such decisions here or if we were sitting around the UK Cabinet table?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
It could have looked at various things, such as wealth taxes—it could have looked at raising funds in a variety of ways. The Chancellor of the Exchequer boxed herself in, leaving very limited room for manoeuvre. I suspect that she would not have wanted to do what she has done, having boxed herself in. She probably did not want to do it, but because she would not unpick the constraints that she had put on herself, she had, by her own actions, left herself with very little room for manoeuvre.
Within the policy—if there had been an absolute decision around the UK Cabinet table that the Government had to use ENICs and that there was no other way—the Cabinet members could have chosen to do that differently. For example, they could have chosen to make sure that the public sector across the UK was fully funded, but they chose not to do that. They could have given exemptions to third sector organisations. They could have looked—
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
On the first point, I will look to see whether that work can be concluded more quickly and provided earlier than June.
In response to the second point, I note that Ivan McKee was clear in a media interview yesterday that it is important that the summit was not a stand-alone, one-off event. It followed a lot of work with public sector leaders, so that everybody understands what is being asked of them and so that we are not expecting business as usual.
09:45We need change and reform, so to incentivise them we have put in place the invest to save fund. I am sure that expectations about bids, about the pace of change and reform, and about the fund’s delivery are topics of conversation. I assure you that Ivan McKee is very hands-on and focused on that work and is more involved in considering the details than ministers have been previously. He is working with leaders across the public sector to improve the work’s pace.
Although the word “strategy” is mentioned, reform is not a long-term aspiration; it is about releasing savings, doing things differently, sharing services and improving public services within the fiscal envelope that is available to us, so that they deliver for people and help them at an earlier stage rather than just addressing problems. It is about getting more upstream, which is what yesterday’s event focused on.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
No, Michael. The First Minister did not say that, at all. He never said that he would cut £636 million.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
This might be a kind of student debating point but, at the end of the day, the First Minister—
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
Yes.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
Ivan McKee has been on a data-mining mission to address the gaps where data does not exist. You are right in saying that, without data, it is very difficult. Sometimes, it is the data lying underneath that you really need, instead of just the top-level data. We absolutely get that.
There is a tension between public bodies getting on with doing X, Y and Z, and feeling that that is their domain, and, because we are funding them to do this, our need to know that they are delivering in the most efficient way. Everybody has to play their part in ensuring that we are optimising the efficiency of every single organisation, whether through reform, shared services or digital. The interrogation of that perhaps takes place at a deeper level than previously.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
No. If there is a range of options to be had, a range of options would be put in front of us. No other options were available that would have the same impact on child poverty. Nothing else emerged in the discussions with child poverty organisations that was going to have that impact. We were given a very clear steer by child poverty organisations that this policy was the one thing that would make the difference in reducing child poverty levels. They had previously pointed towards an increase in the Scottish child payment, which would have been the other obvious option, but they said to us that, rather than do that, with all of the issues around cliff edges and its rubbing up against disincentivising employment and so on, targeting the poorest kids through the mitigation of the two-child cap was the single intervention that we could make that would have the biggest impact. It emerged in a way that there was—