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 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.
Displaying 2341 contributions
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Willie Coffey
Is that the same with the other growth deals? Is there no MSP representation in the decision-making process on any of the growth deals?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Willie Coffey
Good morning, secretary of state. I have two questions: one on flexible funding arrangements, given the changing economic circumstances that we find ourselves in; and one on the science and innovation aspects of the growth deals.
We touched on the first question a wee while ago. Some of the projects in the Ayrshire growth deal have fallen off the table. On behalf of your Government, can you say whether the funding will still be in place should new projects emerge that might take up that slack, or will the funding be withdrawn, given the circumstances that we find ourselves in?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Willie Coffey
So there was no money at all behind the £800 million commitment for the supercomputer.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Willie Coffey
As I understand it, the University of Edinburgh has already spent about £30 million preparing for that project. Is there any chance that it might get that money back?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Willie Coffey
I am glad to hear that. I will not ask you my second question about supercomputers, which we got into earlier. Instead, I want to touch base with you and get your thoughts on the democratisation element of the growth deals. Some time ago, one of our witnesses talked about how democratic the decision-making process is in the growth deals. The Scottish Government puts in nearly half of the entire funding, or just short of that, but folk like us have no formal representation on any of the growth deals—I certainly did not have that in Ayrshire.
Is that approach right? I think that Derek Shaw said that Scottish Enterprise has voting rights at one of the committees, so maybe he could explain that. Can you say anything about the principle of democratisation? Have the public been taken along with the growth deals and felt part of them? Alternatively, is it a system that we have decided to deliver to people without their real participation? Particularly for us as elected members of the Parliament, there has been no direct say in the design, development or agreement of the projects.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Willie Coffey
Okay. Is it the same in the Highlands?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Willie Coffey
Before I ask about broader flexibility in the affordable housing supply programme, I want to go back to the issue that Meghan Gallacher raised about whether and when we can reach the target. In your opening presentation, Paul, you said that the Scottish Government is spending £97 million on discretionary housing payments. I think that a huge amount of that is for mitigating the bedroom tax, which, as we know, was introduced by the previous UK Government and has been retained by the current UK Government. If that money were available to you instead of its being used to mitigate that tax, could it be deployed to help you reach the target of 110,000 affordable homes?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Willie Coffey
A question arose about how we improve the interconnectedness or joined-up delivery of some of our housing policies and about how housing connects with other services. When your namesake, Professor Maclennan, came to the committee, he said that housing departments tend not to co-ordinate with other policy departments. Is that something that you recognise from your long experience—15 years, as you mentioned a minute ago—and, if it is, how do we improve on that to ensure that we get joined-up policy development and delivery?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Willie Coffey
Before anyone else comes in, is the £4 million for all 32 local authorities, or is it for only the five local authorities that you are working closely with?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Willie Coffey
How would the committee or others see that wider influence in the housing programmes that will emerge in the remainder of the current parliamentary session?