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 ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and committees will automatically update to show only the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ 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 1428 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Shona Robison
We have not decided yet about the block grant adjustment. We will make that decision in due course, as part of our budget considerations. It is one thing to devolve the power; however, if the funding is not devolved the benefit is, in effect, half devolved.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Shona Robison
If I remember correctly, the fiscal framework enables us to defer block grant adjustments: that is part of the fiscal framework. The question for us is to ask what makes sense, which is why those discussions are on-going. We will be fully transparent once decisions are brought to a conclusion.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Shona Robison
My understanding is that, this winter, the winter fuel payment will be made to Scottish recipients by the Department for Work and Pensions. That will continue. The year after that, it will be issued through Social Security Scotland. A whole new system would have had to be set up for universal payment through Social Security Scotland. That could not be done. It was going to go ahead, but it is now not happening because we do not have the £160 million to deliver it. The payment will have to be delivered like for like with what is delivered this year by the DWP, because of timing. I think that that has all been set out to the Parliament.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Shona Robison
We would get the £160 million, and the payment would have been administered through Social Security Scotland. However, that funding was to come on an on-going basis. It is not, now. If we were to defer the block grant adjustment for a year and pay the benefit for one year, we would have to set up a whole system to pay that benefit universally, with absolutely no chance of its continuing.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Shona Robison
If things had continued, and the money was going to come with the power, as we had planned for—the power has come to us, but not the money—we would be delivering a winter fuel payment on a universal basis from Scotland this winter. The fact that that did not happen meant that we had to stop the work, and Social Security Scotland stopped its recruitment, because we could not possibly have set up a whole system to pay people for one year, delaying the block grant adjustment for a year, then saying, “Oh well, you’re going now.â€
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Shona Robison
The reconciliation of the money happens either this year or next year. There is no gain—it is just a question of in which year the money is reconciled.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Shona Robison
I go back to the point that I made earlier about us having a bit of self-regulation. I am going to write to the committee with the detail of our assumptions on that. However, we have internal rules about what our assumptions are, and we have the £3 billion limit. Fiscal framework adjustments have been helpful for inflation proofing those elements of the framework. However, we want to ensure that anything that we do in relation to capital debt is deemed to be prudent and affordable.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Shona Robison
I think that it was assumed that there was an alignment with the objectives. It is not that the programme for government was saying that everything that had gone before was not important; instead, it was elevating things of absolutely critical importance and saying that they would come first and foremost in the budget discussion.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Shona Robison
No. I look forward to further engagement with the committee on the budget as we go forward.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Shona Robison
I do not accept that. However, I accept that we have, in essence, been trying to make a budget work through a set of absolutely chaotic UK Government decisions, although those decisions have now become less chaotic. Looking to 2025-26 and beyond, that is extremely helpful.
However, trying to set a budget, pay policy or anything else with absolutely no idea of the funding that you will get is really difficult. This might sound basic, but our having an idea earlier in the year what the budget will be and what funding we can expect to receive from the UK Government would be transformational.
I will mention one point before it goes out of my head. Anyone who is involved in negotiations understands their complexity, and the importance of not driving pay inflation and of recognising that it is not just about pay but about making efficiencies, as part of the settlement. For example, in rail, part of the pay deal was linked to making efficiencies.
I would not cut the health budget in order to have contingency in case the pay increase goes up to 5 per cent. Instead, we would look at anything that was above the parameters that we have set to be paid for through efficiency gains and productivity gains. We have to be careful about what we say in pay policy, otherwise it drives scenarios that are not helpful for the public purse. I do not want to cut budgets while we are in the process of negotiating, because that just drives wage inflation. We have to be careful about what we are setting out and what our expectations are.
I will, of course—I do—look carefully at comments from the Fraser of Allander Institute, the SFC and others. However, I re-emphasise how complex pay is and how important it is for us to be very careful about how we land pay policy.
