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 1731 contributions
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Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
Please do not take the next question as a difficult one, because I do not want to breach any confidences in your work, but how many complaints against board members—there will be nearly 800 people in this space—have you dealt with over the past year, and how many live cases are you working on? Are you seeing any common patterns or themes emerging from the nature of those complaints—again, without mentioning the specifics of them?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
Do you report on those? Are they a matter of public record?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
If you have an NHS board that has financial governance issues and is in the red, or has performance or operational issues—if, for example, it is not meeting any of its clinical targets or has high turnover or other issues of governance—do you have to wait on someone complaining to you before there is an investigation into that board? To me, there are clearly situations where the board has a direct level of accountability for overseeing all of the above, and there are clearly failures in many of those areas—we look at them weekly.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
What due diligence takes place to ensure that people are not brought into a health board when the board that they have previously run—or been an integral part of running—has been underperforming operationally, clinically or financially? Are those the people you want in our health boards?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
Right. Has anyone who has run a board that has had such high-level escalation or intervention moved to another board?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
Yes, please check that and write to us.
We talked a little bit in the earlier session about the importance of the role of the non-executive board in holding the executive to account in any public body or organisation. If someone has been part and parcel of that organisation for a long period of time, although I can see that they may bring knowledge and experience of that sector to their non-exec role, are they simply too close to the system and the people involved in it to be able to hold them properly to account in terms of governance arrangements?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
Yes, we heard some good examples of that as well, which is great. There is, however, an issue. There is a 25 per cent failure rate in the first round of recruitment at the highest level. That is one in four vacancies where there is a failure to appoint a candidate. That is an extremely high number relative to other parts of the public sector. Why is it so bad?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
Yes, the aspiring chairs programme was mentioned and it seems to be reaping some degree of success as a pipeline generating new entrants and bringing people up the chain. That is particularly helpful.
However, the issues of time commitment and remuneration were first brought up in the 2021 survey. We are four years on from that. Those are not new issues, yet many boards are still struggling.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Cairngorm Funicular Railway
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
Jamie Greene
It sounds as though you undertook an interesting due diligence process. What is the shelf life of the funicular once it is fully remediated? When will you have to start thinking about replacement?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Flooding in communities: Moving towards flood resilience”
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
Jamie Greene
I will begin with a general question. The cycle 1 flood schemes were identified 10 years ago. There were 40 schemes in the plan, the cost of delivering which was estimated to be around £350 million at the time. You now estimate that cost to be around £1 billion, which is a lot of money. Is that your estimate of how much it would cost to deliver the 40 schemes if they were to be delivered in full today, or is that the amount that you understand that the Government has now allocated to their completion? It is a lot of money.
