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 3472 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
National Performing Companies (Economic Impact)
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
John Mason
The National Theatre of Scotland has a link with Easterhouse in Glasgow. Has that worked? Do you have a diverse audience?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
National Performing Companies (Economic Impact)
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
John Mason
Is there more of a challenge in the cities? It is one thing to go to a place such as Kirkwall, where there is a mixed community to start with, but do you get a lot of people from the east end when you perform in Glasgow?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27 (United Kingdom Context)
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
John Mason
And did I pick up that, in the long term, interest rates are expected to rise again?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27 (United Kingdom Context)
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
John Mason
Thanks. Finally, the UK Government is committing to just one fiscal event a year, but you are still going to do two forecasts. Is that how it will work?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27 (United Kingdom Context)
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
John Mason
So, it is a bit of a technicality. It is not going to have any real practical impact.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
National Performing Companies (Economic Impact)
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
John Mason
Mr Mackie wants to come in.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
John Mason
I accept that the situation is improving, which is positive.
With regard to the visits that take place—including pre-placement visits, although you explained that a pre-placement visit may not be possible—who carries them out? Are they always carried out by the placing authority? Could Devon County Council, say, ask Falkirk Council to do a visit on its behalf?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
John Mason
To follow on from previous questions, I have one or two points arising from the policy note. Willie Rennie asked about the differences in how a child from Scotland and a child from England would be looked after or treated. I was struck by the second page of the policy note, which states:
“The Scottish Government also understands that children are sometimes placed without education provision having been agreed, leading to children being without education for prolonged periods.”
That sounds very concerning to me. Is that the type of issue that we are talking about? For a Scottish child, that would not happen, because the local authority would know that they needed education, but it could happen for a child from elsewhere. Is that the issue?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
John Mason
The policy note mentions that placements might be in “remote parts of Scotland”, but for someone who is in the Isle of Wight or somewhere like that, Glasgow is remote, is it not? Anywhere in Scotland could be remote from that point of view.
The six-weekly visit seems to be a minimum. The policy note refers to situations
“Where a six weekly visit is not possible”,
and elsewhere it says that six-weekly visits should be made
“insofar as reasonably practicable”.
That seems quite a lot like a get-out. If a child is with an unknown family in an unknown town, six weeks is quite a long period in terms of finding out how they are getting on. Can you give us any reassurance on that? Would phone calls normally be made as well? If a six-weekly visit is not “practicable”, the child could be in a bad situation for quite a while.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
John Mason
Okay. So, the child will be more likely to get the provision that they should be getting.
You and others have already mentioned the question of whether it is in the child’s best interests to be placed in Scotland. Can you expand on what that means? If a child is from, say, Devon, I could understand that they might want to be in Cornwall, to be a bit further away from their local environment, but Scotland—even Glasgow or Edinburgh—would be quite remote from their area.
