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 1011 contributions
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Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Decision on Taking Business in Private
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Daniel Johnson
Under agenda item 2, I ask for members’ agreement to take agenda items 4 and 5 in private.
Members indicated agreement.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Consumer Scotland
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Daniel Johnson
We move to agenda item 3. As I said, we have representatives of Consumer Scotland with us this morning as part of our pre-budget scrutiny. I believe that Mr Wilson would like to make a brief introductory statement.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Consumer Scotland
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Daniel Johnson
Thank you very much. I will start with some opening questions before I bring in other members.
Why has your annual report, which you touched on, not been published yet? It is very difficult for us to carry out pre-budget scrutiny if we do not have an annual report in front of us.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Consumer Scotland
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Daniel Johnson
However, you understand that that makes it very difficult for us to carry out our scrutiny.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Consumer Scotland
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Daniel Johnson
How many unique visitors to your website does that equate to?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Consumer Scotland
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Daniel Johnson
No—that sounds like the number of views. It does not matter.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Consumer Scotland
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Daniel Johnson
In the previous year’s annual report, 18,767 views translated to 3,786 unique users. Maybe you could come back to us with that figure, but it is not important.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Consumer Scotland
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Daniel Johnson
Before I bring in our deputy convener, Murdo Fraser has a supplementary question.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Consumer Scotland
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Daniel Johnson
I will come on to those points about engagement. From your response, it sounds as though you are measuring your influence on other parts of the public sector as an outcome, but are not measuring benefits to consumers. I think that most people would describe the former as an output rather than an outcome. In your opening statement, you described your objective as creating benefits to consumers in Scotland, but nothing in your answer really describes such benefits, unless I am missing something.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Consumer Scotland
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Daniel Johnson
Do you understand that, in terms of presentation, that is an issue for us? If we hear the chair of a board providing answers of a detailed operational nature, at least it is incumbent on us to ask whether there is an appropriate separation. This is not the first time that I have made that observation.
