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 657 contributions
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Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Review of the EU-UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement
Meeting date: 6 February 2025
Keith Brown
I will come to Ms Bevan shortly, because I know that that question was probably less relevant—
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Review of the EU-UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement
Meeting date: 6 February 2025
Keith Brown
That was my next question. Professor Cardwell referred to challenges with attracting North American students, but those problems were overcome in a fairly straightforward way in the 1980s, when things were perhaps more complex, in some ways. I am not sure what has changed since then, although, there have certainly been changes to visas and so on in the US.
I have a question about what Peter Brown has just said. I do not need to be convinced about the value and benefits of programmes such as these. When I came back from Canada, a woman followed me and married me and gave birth to our three children, who are Canadian Scots, so a link was established with the Maritimes and Canada that had not been there before.
Peter Brown made a point about peace; I think that peace and understanding are key here, but they are very hard to quantify—although, of course, the EU was awarded the Nobel peace prize, because of its ability to diminish the prospect of war after the second world war. The way to try to convince Governments of whichever stripe to reinstate such programmes and, I hope, to reverse Brexit, is to be much more explicit about the benefits. I am not sure that we have done that; I think that we have taken them for granted. What metrics can we use to measure the value of soft power in order to make a more effective case for exchange schemes to continue in future?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Review of the EU-UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement
Meeting date: 6 February 2025
Keith Brown
That was not my personal view—the Government said that.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Review of the EU-UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement
Meeting date: 6 February 2025
Keith Brown
Thank you.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Review of the EU-UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement
Meeting date: 6 February 2025
Keith Brown
Professor Cardwell, I am conscious that everybody I have spoken to who did a year’s exchange described it as the best year that they had at university or of their academic career. How can we best demonstrate the benefits of that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Colleges Regionalisation Inquiry: Post-Inquiry Scrutiny
Meeting date: 5 February 2025
Keith Brown
Audrey Cumberford talked about the nature of the courses that people are interested in having an impact. Has the sector made an assessment of the effectiveness of the SFC’s new outcomes framework and assurance model since its introduction? I was not on the committee when the report was put together, but I know that having data is very important. If people do not have a grip on the matter and the SFC is reluctant to provide particular matrices for people going through the system, that is an issue. Has the sector as a whole looked at the model? If so, what does it make of it?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Colleges Regionalisation Inquiry: Post-Inquiry Scrutiny
Meeting date: 5 February 2025
Keith Brown
Does anyone else want to go further with regard to the Funding Council? Any additional money will have to come from somewhere. Is there an institutional bias in favour of higher education at the expense of further education?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Colleges Regionalisation Inquiry: Post-Inquiry Scrutiny
Meeting date: 5 February 2025
Keith Brown
I presume that the idea is to move at pace. It seems to me that, for your self-interest, it is extremely important that the Funding Council, the Government, this committee and others have a clear idea of what is happening and what benefits are being produced. In my area, one college is steadily withdrawing from a council area that has one of the highest levels of deprivation—Andy Witty mentioned it earlier—so the benefit to that area is reducing over time.
When I had responsibility for colleges 15 years ago, the need for parity of esteem for the college sector was the big rallying cry, and that had some effect. However, parity of esteem is served when the benefits can be demonstrated, so there must be clear and accurate figures. The SFC says that it is not its business to talk about outcomes for individuals—I do not know why that is the case—but surely it is in your interest to make sure that clear information is gathered at pace.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Colleges Regionalisation Inquiry: Post-Inquiry Scrutiny
Meeting date: 5 February 2025
Keith Brown
On the Funding Council point that Willie Rennie has just raised, I say that nearly every comment that you have made—and, in fact, all the comments in the committee’s previous report—relate to funding. Most of us in this committee are on other committees, where we get a pretty constant parade of organisations that say that they want more funding and that are convinced that they are the ones that are treated the worst, but very few acknowledge the constraints that the Scottish Government is under—we have had 14 years of constraint on public sector budgets. However, that is just a thing of mine.
I come back to what the Scottish Government is responsible for and to the Funding Council. Earlier, you mentioned the disparity between the £4,000 that is spent on a college student and the £7,000 or so that is spent on an undergraduate student. In my experience, the year that I had at one of the Edinburgh colleges was the best with regard to educational attainment—it was better than university. Is it your view that the Funding Council has an institutional bias in favour of higher education as opposed to further education?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Interests
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Keith Brown
Having consulted the standards clerks, I have no interests to declare, but I advise the committee that my daughter is a full-time primary school teacher, working for Aberdeen City Council.
