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 1063 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ivan McKee
On your point about disability payments, as we have indicated, there is quite a lot of modelling and forecasting work behind that. However, your points about understanding the factors that drive take-up and demand are well made—are they a function of work being done in other services or a function of campaigns on take-up? We will come back with more specific details to explain what sits behind that.
On staffing levels, I visited Social Security Scotland in Glasgow last week or the week before to go through where it is in relation to its head count projections, its underlying productivity numbers and its work on automation, systems and process improvement. The short answer to your question is that the saving will be a consequence of Social Security Scotland becoming more efficient at what it does. It is on a journey. As more benefits land, they give it more challenges but also, over time, more opportunities to streamline those processes. Managing that budget reduction will partly be a consequence of that work.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ivan McKee
On the in-year increases, one of the first questions was about where the £60 million for health will go, and the answer was that it will go to health boards to deal with precisely those pressures. I do not think that much else will happen this year, as the last few weeks—three or whatever it is—are all about managing a successful budget balancing exercise. Clearly, budgets for next year will be allocated to health boards to support them in that important work, because we are very conscious of the wide variation in IJBs’ performance on delayed discharge. Ensuring that funding is flowing through to support continued reductions in delayed discharge is a priority.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ivan McKee
I am not aware of that, but we have to remember that those numbers are compared against forecast numbers, so it depends on how the forecast is calculated.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ivan McKee
It does, to some extent. I hear what you are saying, but the issue is that we would be trying to deal with the same thing across many programmes and portfolios. If everybody queued up and said, “Just give me a wee bit extra this year”, because of this or that, it would defeat the purpose of our having controls in place and trying to manage things. It would just create more variability with regard to the numbers that we have talked about and our being able to land the 2024-25 spend within the budget and borrowing restrictions.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ivan McKee
Yes—but it is quite late in the day before we can be certain about the known unknowns. We have already had a conversation about the £350 million, and we have talked about social security and a range of other factors on which there might be quite significant movement as a result of demand and other variables on which we would not expect to have final data yet.
By the point at which we would be able to do that, we would probably just be throwing money at something that was not ready, which would be inefficient allocation of resources. If someone has a plan that starts at the start of the new financial year, the most efficient and stable approach is to start it at the start of the next financial year instead of trying to bring things forward a few weeks and having a scramble at the end of this financial year.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ivan McKee
I think that what I said was that we would come back with the historical numbers—that is, what has been in the budget and what has been allocated in-year. Obviously, there is broader work taking place on public service reform and ensuring that all public bodies operate more efficiently. Clearly, the SQA will be no exception to that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ivan McKee
Are you referring to what they spend the money on?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ivan McKee
It is also very inefficient to start winding up projects at year end if you have not planned how they are going to be executed properly; you just have to step back and say that they are still running. The accountancy aspect behind that is all about ensuring that the numbers add up, so that we can bring the money back in at year end and then push it back out again in the new financial year.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ivan McKee
That is all right.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ivan McKee
We will come back to you on the specifics of that issue. It is being dealt with in the net zero portfolio and I do not have the details of those specific projects. We know the funds that will be used, but I will come back to you with information on specific projects from the net zero portfolio.
However, to put the counterfactual to you, if we had not used that money to balance budgets, or if that had not been the intent previously, and we had instead cut health or local government spend, I am sure that you would have been one of the first to complain that we were not using available funds but were cutting essential public services as a consequence.
