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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
If you search by an individual session, the list of 成人快手 and committees will automatically update to show only the 成人快手 and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of 成人快手 and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of 成人快手 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.
Displaying 3539 contributions
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
Kenneth Gibson
Thank you for that very helpful opening statement. The comments next to the very first graph on page 3 of the report sum the situation up: although health spending stands at 36 per cent of the Scottish budget now, it could grow to around 40 per cent by 2029-30 and to an astonishing 55 per cent in 2074-75. There has to be real concern about that, and we have to look at how we can possibly change it.
I do not want to steal John Mason鈥檚 thunder, as he always comments on our ability to project things 50 years into the future when there are so many changes, but, in the last two years, the Scottish Fiscal Commission has changed its projections of the Scottish population by 15 per cent, which is pretty drastic. You now predict that there will be 800,000 more people in Scotland than you had predicted a couple of years ago. One is understandably concerned about how projections within such a short period can be so hugely different.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
Kenneth Gibson
Do you feel that the Government is not meeting those standards?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
Kenneth Gibson
I agree. I just do not think that they are particularly small, reasonable or appropriate.
You also say that the SHRC proposed that a citizen鈥檚 version of each key document should be published. What does that mean?
10:00Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
Kenneth Gibson
I said that I was going to challenge some things. The SHRC report recommends making budget publications available in an accessible, simplified format and in different languages with the participation of existing civil society groups. I understand what that means, but how would it work and what languages should the publications be available in? Who is going to want to read the Scottish budget in Hungarian, Urdu, Swahili or Spanish, for example? Surely that is just nonsense. Let us be honest: everybody in the country bar a small minority is pretty fluent in English, and I think that those who are not will have other priorities before reading the Scottish budget documents.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
Kenneth Gibson
It is interesting that committees may be somewhat loth to look at the MTFS and how it affects them. Perhaps we should look at that in the future. I feel that, when the new 成人快手 come in next year, there should be an element of induction in some of those areas to let them know what we are talking about. There is not much point if only 10 or 20 per cent of the Parliament is debating those issues effectively.
On how effective current public engagement is, you say:
鈥渢he Scottish Government has made some progress in making the budget process more transparent over the last four years but is still failing to reach standards considered adequate by international best practice and ... greater budget transparency is needed to realise human rights.鈥
What country or countries would you say are the gold standard in that regard?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
Kenneth Gibson
That is a politician鈥檚 answer.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
Kenneth Gibson
How closely has the Government stuck to the 2023 MTFS?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
Kenneth Gibson
The fewer, more integrated documents there are, the better, I would have thought.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
Kenneth Gibson
The Fraser of Allander Institute and other organisations have raised concerns about the fiscal sustainability delivery plan not being incorporated directly into the medium-term financial strategy. What is your view on that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
Kenneth Gibson
I do not doubt that the committee has a lot of sympathy for that. We pressed for the MTFS and we were disappointed that there was not one last year.
To reflect the point that David Phillips was trying to make, we have waited this long and, if we wait another few weeks, we might be able to get a more robust, more impactful MTFS. That is the position that I think he is taking. He is talking about what happens after the summer but, to me, that seems like a long time. The difficulty is that, if the strategy were to come out after 11 June, there would be difficulties with finding the time to scrutinise it before the autumn.