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 łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees will automatically update to show only the łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of łÉČËżěĘÖ 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]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 9 December 2025
Craig Hoy
Particularly if you freeze the bands.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 9 December 2025
Craig Hoy
Would you say that it is important that that is done? That seems to be one of the strategic weaknesses of the position that we are in.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 9 December 2025
Craig Hoy
Good morning. In your November 2024 report “Fiscal sustainability and reform in Scotland”, you said that the Scottish Government was not being candid or transparent with the public about the scale of the challenge in the fiscal outlook: by the end of the decade, it is about £4.7 billion of a shortfall. Would it be fair to read into today’s report that it is unrealistic to think that tax can be the mechanism by which the Scottish Government will manage to close that gap?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 9 December 2025
Craig Hoy
Paragraph 58 identifies what the problem is and talks about the need for the Government to tackle that weakness in the forthcoming budget. It goes on to say:
“If this were to be the case, and if the Scottish Government were to further use tax as a lever to close the medium-term fiscal gap, then it would need to increase tax revenues through other means.”
When you talk about “other means”, do you mean that the Government needs to try to change the pattern of the labour market in Scotland? Is that what we should be considering, or does “other means” sound an alarm bell with regard to the possibility that the Scottish Government might look at other, new forms of taxation?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 9 December 2025
Craig Hoy
I have a final, technical point. In paragraph 71, you rightly note that,
“In its letter to the Public Audit Committee, setting out its assessment, the Scottish Government committed to providing further analysis within the MTFS”
in relation to
“weaker relative earnings and employment performance in Scotland”.
Obviously, the Government has not provided us with such analysis. Are you aware of whether it has been done? The committee can perhaps take that up, but I wondered whether, through any of your inquiries, you had found out whether that work has been done.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 9 December 2025
Craig Hoy
Perhaps the committee can follow up on that. Thank you.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 9 December 2025
Craig Hoy
What would that look like in practice? Would it involve HMRC and the Scottish Government providing people with far more in-depth annual tax statements?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 9 December 2025
Craig Hoy
I presume that fiscal drag—freezing thresholds—is the stealthy way to do it, because people do not realise that they are being dragged into the next band. It is not the most transparent way of raising taxation.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 9 December 2025
Craig Hoy
In terms of pulling the levers of taxation, it seems to me, reading into this, that there are two forms of behavioural change. There is behavioural change by employees and by employers—Ms Smith referred to that. For example, a financial services company that I spoke to recently said that it offers its graduate trainees from Scotland the opportunity to work in any office in the UK and many elect to do so, because they are clever people and they work out that they will be significantly better off in the short, medium and long term if they go and work in Manchester rather than in Glasgow. I am always saying that because of the opacity in relation to behavioural change, we only manage to find out the damage that has been done after it has been done.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 9 December 2025
Craig Hoy
On the issue of transparency, you say in the report that there is less behavioural change with threshold changes than there is with rate changes. We have often called threshold changes stealth taxes. People do not realise that they are being dragged into upper-rate tax because they have received an annual increase in their pay. Does the Government have more to do to provide transparency on the way in which it collects tax, given that threshold changes rather than rate changes seem to be the default of both Governments at the moment?
