Official Report: search what was said in Parliament

Chamber and committees

Official Report: search what was said in Parliament

The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.

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Dates of parliamentary sessions

Session 1: 12 May 1999 to 31 March 2003
Session 2: 7 May 2003 to 2 April 2007
Session 3: 9 May 2007 to 22 March 2011
Session 4: 11 May 2011 to 23 March 2016
Session 5: 12 May 2016 to 4 May 2021
Session 6: 13 May 2021 to 8 April 2026

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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.

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 ��˿�� and committees will automatically update to show only the ��˿�� and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of ��˿�� and committees from Session 1.

If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of ��˿�� and committees will update to show the information that was current at that time.

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Displaying 1673 contributions

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Criminal Justice Committee

Police (Ethics, Conduct and Scrutiny) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 2

Meeting date: 2 October 2024

Russell Findlay

Could I make a quick point?

Criminal Justice Committee

Police (Ethics, Conduct and Scrutiny) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 2

Meeting date: 2 October 2024

Russell Findlay

I understand that amendment 62 may potentially seem to be out of place in the bill, but we have been told by the Scottish Government, the SPA and Police Scotland that Scotland’s police officers are finally about to start being required to wear body-worn cameras as standard. It has been a slow process, but the pilot scheme has begun. The last that we heard from the chief constable was that, although the roll-out had been delayed, it was—apparently—still going to happen.

The amendment’s purpose relates to the understanding that, when body-worn cameras do become commonly used, they will in all likelihood have a significant impact on the matters that the bill deals with—namely, police misconduct and regulation. Amendment 62 would request that

“Ministers ... prepare and publish a report on the”

value of

“body-worn cameras in ... enforcing standards of”

constables’ behaviour. For all that body-worn cameras will in the main—I imagine—be used in the pursuit of dealing with criminality by the public and as evidence in that regard, they may, in other cases, potentially be used to deal with police misbehaviour or other matters that relate to the bill.

Amendment 62 would ask the Government to publish a report within one year of the bill receiving royal assent or of the conclusion of Police Scotland’s body-worn cameras pilot—whichever of those dates was the earliest.

It has been said that body-worn cameras

“will transform policing in Scotland”.

My amendment seeks to future proof matters slightly in anticipation of body-worn cameras coming into use by legislating at least for assessing, in some way, how significant they may or may not be in respect of police misconduct cases.

I move amendment 62.

Criminal Justice Committee

Police (Ethics, Conduct and Scrutiny) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 2

Meeting date: 2 October 2024

Russell Findlay

Although I have withdrawn or not moved most of my amendments today, I am minded to put amendment 66 to a vote, if necessary. Angiolini made a large number of recommendations, most of which were non-legislative and, on the face of it, relatively minor, but her recommendation that the PIRC should be accountable to Parliament is fundamental to the job that she was tasked with—that of looking at the entire picture. She saw the current arrangement as a weakness.

It is worth putting on the record the fact that the PIRC would still be accountable to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service on criminal matters. My proposal relates entirely to operational matters relating to non-criminal issues. It simply seems like a bit of sensible housekeeping. I have not been persuaded by the arguments against what I propose. There are some practical issues, but they could readily be overcome if the Government was so minded. I will therefore put the matter to a vote.