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 1392 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 30 September 2025
Liz Smith
What is happening about drilling down on some of the detail? You mentioned the health service, so let us take that as an example. Some health boards are more effective than others in aspiring to the aims and ambitions of the Scottish Government. You and I have sat through discussions in NHS Tayside, for example, in which there was a determination to try to learn from other health boards where there is good practice. Is the Government going into that level of detail on how effective the spend can be in different portfolios?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 30 September 2025
Liz Smith
I want to ask you about the second part of the statement that you gave on 2 September and what you have said this morning about identifying programmes that are proven to work. You have given some examples of where the Government has some focus. The convener suggested that there is a corollary to that. I know that you are not going to reveal any details about the budget, but if there are programmes that are clearly not working and have not been working through previous budgets, what action will the Government take in areas where the spending has not provided the outcomes that the Government would like? Is the Scottish Government in a position to say, “Here are the programmes that are working well, and here is the evidence that supports that, but here is evidence that other programmes are not working well and where money could be saved or, in some cases, transferred”? Is the Government at that stage?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 30 September 2025
Liz Smith
Is that with a view to making cuts in certain areas?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 30 September 2025
Liz Smith
Do you feel that those very difficult decisions are sufficiently transparent? It is an extremely difficult task for the Government, in tight fiscal circumstances, to make the right decisions about what is working well and what is not working well. Is there sufficient transparency in the evidence on which policies are most effective in delivering for the Government and which policies are not effective and should therefore potentially be scrapped?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 30 September 2025
Liz Smith
It is just like your manifesto of 2021.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 16 September 2025
Liz Smith
Cabinet secretary, you said in answer to the convener that you were very disappointed about the report in The Scotsman about the £36 million and that the article was not accurate. Do you mean that £36 million is not an accurate figure?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 16 September 2025
Liz Smith
I understand that, but it is a very important amount of money. Given what the convener was, rightly, asking, we have a duty to scrutinise that. If the convener agrees, it would be helpful if we could get an update on that fairly quickly. It matters for the budget because it is a large sum. It would be helpful for us to have an update as soon as possible.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 16 September 2025
Liz Smith
I understand that that has implications for budgets in general, which brings me nicely to my next point. The convener twice attempted to ask you about the opportunity costs—again, it comes back to the scrutiny of this Parliament. On the basis of what modelling does the Scottish Government believe that its social security approaches are providing better benefits and better outcomes in delivering the anti-poverty strategy compared with college funding, schools funding, early years funding and many other things? What actual opportunity cost measurement is the Scottish Government undertaking to provide the evidence for its policy decisions, which allows financial scrutiny by this committee to show whether those policies are the right ones?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 16 September 2025
Liz Smith
But cabinet secretary, the Fiscal Commission is predicting that, between the coming budget and 2029-30, the social security budget will go up by nearly 30 per cent. That is a huge increase. The committee is interested to know what might be cut in relation to that spend. We have heard this morning that various other portfolios are complaining bitterly about a lack of money. In order to make judgments on the issue, the committee has to see what the outcomes are. That question is a huge issue for the Scottish Government, given what the Scottish Fiscal Commission says is a completely unsustainable social security benefit system for the future.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 16 September 2025
Liz Smith
Your colleague Shona Robison is arguing strongly that you cannot roll out universalism to a greater extent because you simply cannot afford it.
To come back on the point that you raised earlier, the Government wants to target those who are most in need. That is what we signed up to in 2018. I suggest that the policy of universalism across the board is simply not sustainable for the Scottish budget.
