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 2466 contributions
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
Graham Simpson
Okay. That is a very odd situation; I think that you need to tackle that issue.
As we look ahead, what safeguards have you got in place to prevent future structural failures and ensure reliability?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
Graham Simpson
I will, indeed, ask about finances, but my interest has been piqued by news that you want to open a toboggan. Will you tell me a bit about that? That might attract me up there. [Laughter.]
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
Graham Simpson
That sounds very exciting.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
Graham Simpson
It is fair to say that, for the vast majority of the time that the funicular has been in existence, it has made a loss. Have you managed to tot up what the loss has been over the years?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
Graham Simpson
Is the current position that you will break even?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
Graham Simpson
Will you explain that bit about people not being able to get out at the top? You will get the funicular up to a point—
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
Graham Simpson
There is a restaurant and so on. What do you mean when you say that you cannot get out?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
Graham Simpson
That sounds bizarre. You can walk to the top and get the funicular down, but you cannot do that in reverse?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
Graham Simpson
Do you need to do something about the conditions around the planning permission?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
Graham Simpson
Magic carpets. That is something else to check out, convener.