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 2336 contributions
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 11 June 2025
Willie Coffey
I see that Dr Crighton wants to come in.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 11 June 2025
Willie Coffey
I have a final question for Jane Martin, which is a bit like the one that Daniel Johnson asked. What role do you see Scottish Enterprise having in the community wealth building process? How do you see the organisation working with, say, South Lanarkshire Council to grow and develop the whole principle of community wealth building?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 11 June 2025
Willie Coffey
On the legacy issue, are you convinced that Ineos is committed in that regard? The fact that a bundle of money has been put on the table is really welcome, because Kilmarnock did not get that from Diageo. However, from your engagement with Ineos, are you convinced that it is committed to participating in that legacy process for the community?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 11 June 2025
Willie Coffey
Good morning. My question is probably for Jackie Taylor from South Lanarkshire Council, but I would be obliged if our other two colleagues were able to respond, too.
Jackie, you will have heard committee members say that we were down in Irvine in North Ayrshire on Monday, where we met fantastic local people who deliver local projects there, as well as some great officials, who provide support.
My colleague Lorna Slater mentioned the diagnostic tool that North Ayrshire Council has developed. I am keen to ask you whether South Lanarkshire Council has been able to do something similar. Your authority has a big area and many communities to cover; it stretches all the way from Rutherglen away down to Biggar, it includes East Kilbride, and there are small villages all over the place. Do you intend to embark on a diagnostic process that engages with communities at their level to understand their needs, their hopes and their aspirations for what community wealth building could bring them?
12:00Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 11 June 2025
Willie Coffey
Thank you.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 11 June 2025
Willie Coffey
Thanks for saying that.
I turn to the issue of the workers. How just is it for them to get either a redundancy check or an offer to take their families and move away somewhere else to work? If a just transition were in place, we would surely see people who live in that community being able to transition to these wonderful projects that are coming on stream rather than having to move away. That is what I understand a just transition to mean, and I hope that you share that view, too. I would be keen to hear whether the workers at Grangemouth think that we are in a just transition process, or whether they agree with me that everything has been rather sudden and they have been forced into the situation that they now face.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 11 June 2025
Willie Coffey
Good morning. We use the term “just transition” a lot and the public hear it a lot, but I am not certain that we know what it means. For me, it means that a community is given the time to adjust to a situation, rather than what has happened, which seems to have been an almost overnight closure and asset-stripping exercise by Ineos. I think back to the days when Diageo announced the closure of the Johnnie Walker plant in Kilmarnock. Even Diageo took three years to effect that closure, which gave our community time to adjust, plan and prepare. Looking at Grangemouth as an outsider, I do not see that. That is anything but a just transition.
10:45To your credit, you have mentioned a number of projects that have been under way for a while, not only since the closure announcement. That is great, but a just transition has to be embraced by all the parties around the table—all the Governments and the company. Do you get the sense that we have such a process in place and that the company is committed to that?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Willie Coffey
Good morning. I am excited to hear the passion with which you speak about this subject. I have heard it before from some of you, and it is very encouraging.
I will stick to the community dimension and the participation element. I have seen community wealth building working in North Ayrshire and East Ayrshire, and I am encouraged to hear from Councillor Forson about what is happening in Clackmannanshire. I have seen it work in practice, and that was before the bill appeared.
I invite you to share some views about what is actually making community wealth building work. Is it committed and passionate staff and community members who drive it? We could have more strategies and guidance notes than we have ever seen, but that is not what makes this thing tick; it is down to the commitment and passion of local officials to drive it forward and gain participation from the community.
Do you recognise that? Can you see that happening in your own authority and elsewhere? Do you see it reflected in the proposals in the bill to try to encourage other authorities to embrace it?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Willie Coffey
How do we do that? How do we transform that wonderful local experience of community wealth building in some parts of Scotland to other parts that might be yet to embrace it? What is the key to that? It is not about writing strategies and guidance notes—we need to do something else, do we not?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Willie Coffey
Professor Escobar, how do we share that experience across the rest of Scotland?