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 ˿ and committees will automatically update to show only the ˿ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of ˿ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of ˿ 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 2298 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Douglas Ross
When was that meeting?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Douglas Ross
Dr McGeorge, you told us that you did not know about the matter until November. Were you at that meeting on or around 10 October? Were you not listening when you were told about a potential—
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Douglas Ross
Why did you tell us that you were not aware of it until November?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Douglas Ross
That is handy.
How can you expect us to trust your evidence when refuting it is so clear, so obvious and so simple? Of course you were aware of this when the finance director was leaving. No finance director or incoming interim finance director would let it bypass the company secretary and chief operating officer. Why sit there and expect us to believe your mistruths?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Douglas Ross
When it did come up, why did you wait a month to send an email to the Funding Council?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Douglas Ross
Once again, I thank you for the time that you have given us and for coming here today. I have to commend you for agreeing to come before the committee; it is right that you have the opportunity to put your side of the argument. I welcome the fact that Professor Gillespie has agreed to do the same tomorrow and that others before you have come to give evidence, too.
I note, for those watching who are following our agenda, that the committee agreed to discuss our further agenda items via correspondence. Therefore, instead of suspending the meeting, I will simply close it.
Meeting closed at 13:41.Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Douglas Ross
On the matter of your email to the Funding Council, given the gravity of what you were informing the Funding Council of, do you think that the language that you have used was appropriate? You said, “I’m dropping you a line.” It is like me saying that I dropped my wife a line at the end of a meeting to ask her how her morning had gone.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Douglas Ross
And that those lasted for several months—up to half a year.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Douglas Ross
I want to come back to and test the covenant point a bit further later. Mr Fotheringham and Dr McGeorge, in response to Mr Rennie’s initial questions, you spoke about underrecruitment being the big issue. That challenges the Gillies report’s findings, because Professor Gillies is very clear that the issue was the excessive spending over a significant period.
Are you challenging the report or do you accept that the issue was not underrecruitment, which many universities struggled with, but your decisions to continue spending at significant rates and increase staffing levels even though student numbers were going down? Gillies is right, and what you are saying this morning is not correct, Mr Fotheringham.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Douglas Ross
Ms Millar, in response to Mr Greer, you spoke about the conduct and environment that you wanted for your court, in which your court members could challenge things, but you said that perhaps the information that you were provided with to provide that challenge was not as good as it could be. The Courier has had outstanding coverage of this issue and has been a trusted voice that people have gone to in order to shine a light on what was happening internally. It quotes one of the members of your court as saying that you would shut down questions about finances because that was an operational matter and that you would not allow such questions to be asked.
