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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.

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.

Meeting date: 18 December 2025

Patrick Harvie

Can I suggest a change that—although it would not absolutely lock them in, as you are right that we cannot fundamentally bind future Governments—could make it more likely that improvements to the relationship would persist? We could make some changes around the public discussion of the intergovernmental space. Most of what we have talked about in relation to intergovernmental relationships was about what you described, quite legitimately, as the private space that is required for Governments to discuss issues that are not yet in the public domain.

I respect the fact that there will always be a need for that, but there is no public space in which the intergovernmental decisions that happen in the grey area in the split between devolved and reserved matters are actually held accountable. When we talk about transparency we usually talk about whether there are minutes of meetings or whether reports will be produced, rather than about whether there is any public process at all.

I can make a comparison. Here, within the Scottish Parliament, during the whole period in which there has been a minority Government, that Government has needed to negotiate every year with other political parties about the budget. That negotiation has needed some private space, but no one would pretend that that private negotiation is a substitute for the public scrutiny that takes place in committees before, during and after the budget process.

Would having some mechanism for the devolved Scottish Parliament committees and UK Parliament committees to meet jointly and to call the ministers that they wish to call to answer questions in public create a built-in incentive for some sort of dialogue? That would not necessarily require formal co-decision but could ensure that people are on the same page. You gave the example of Erasmus+. If ministers who were about to make such an announcement knew that they would be asked in public about Scottish funding arrangements, they would have an incentive to ensure that they knew the answer.