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 818 contributions
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Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
If you set up a crowdfunder for that, I will contribute.
Do others have responses to the question about the degree of autonomy that BBC Scotland could or should have and how that relates to the wider regulation of the media landscape?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
Do I have time for a final question, convener?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
I have already downloaded the classic-era “Doctor Who”, so I am safe there.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
Do you think that that sort of thing can be defined in a way that restricts it to the BBC’s economic activity, instead of its content with regard to issues around, say, economic growth being affected?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
Forgive me, but what would be the role of a broadcasting commission?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
I think that he also said that they would not even pitch it now.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
That is really interesting. Thank you.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
I want to ask about something a little bit narrower and more prosaic. The submissions contain a number of specific proposals on charter renewal, one of which relates to the BBC selling advertising or using paywalls. I am not immersed in this myself, but as a viewer, a listener and a reader, I would say that my instinct would be to recoil from that a little bit. However, I am curious about whether you think that there are any such models that the BBC could use in ways that do not rub up against the expectations of what it ought to be. Is there any way in which those models could be legitimately used?
There is also a proposal to include in the BBC’s remit the responsibility to promote economic growth. In relation to its generation of content, its skills and its investment capacity, there might be an argument for giving the BBC an economic remit, but is there a danger that that would feed into its content and editorial choices instead of its being seen merely as a statement of how it creates and stimulates economic activity in broadcasting?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
Thank you.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
I take the point about the regard in which the World Service and the BBC more generally are held. However, I think that we have to see its drama production, for example, in the context of the massive streaming platforms that are putting huge amounts of money into content that they know will have a global reach and a global audience, instead of necessarily telling national or local stories.
The BBC is still a massive news-gathering machine and yet, as with STV, it is not able to provide the local news content in which I think a lot of people would have the trust that you say has been damaged. Indeed, in its news content, the BBC is, in my view, not setting the agenda any more; instead, it is reacting to the context in which it sits, which is dominated by platforms that share openly racist, far-right and conspiracist content and by algorithms that push that stuff at people rather than any proper editorial content. In fact, the BBC ends up responding to that context to the extent that GB News pundits are being put on as though they were part of the legitimate commentariat, instead of the far-right cranks that they would have been dismissed as in previous decades.
The question that I am trying to get to is this: in looking at charter renewal, are we making a mistake in thinking that we can simply fix the BBC, without fixing the media landscape and taking a more responsible approach to media regulation more generally, including the streamers, the online platforms and the other places where people think that they are getting news content, when in fact they are getting whatever Elon Musk is deciding to push at them?
