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 MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs 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 1523 contributions
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Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
Do you have an active plan for the next wave of how to engage with local authorities, given the disparity in the figures? I appreciate that the local authorities have been affected by Covid and are restarting a lot of their operations.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
You have said that you spoke to your customers, but what specific feedback did you get from those who still had outstanding cases from 2017? Did they say that they wanted the cases that had been lodged more recently to be dealt with first? Did you break it down in that way?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
Yes, we are quite pushed for time.
If the convener agrees, I just want to ask on behalf of the committee whether you can come back to us with an outline of your specific strategy for dealing with cases from 2017 and reflect on what threads of that will influence your strategy for dealing with backlog cases from subsequent years. I do not accept the sort of revisionist approach that suggests that by getting rid of the term “backlog”, you can get rid of the backlog itself. If some of these historic cases are not dealt with, it could be “catastrophic”—I agree with Mr Robertson’s assessment here—if a rejection were to occur, hence my asking about your strategy.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
Am I correct in understanding that the time period for expedite cases does not include the period of time since they were lodged? Has your process changed?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
For the record, then, you are saying that if solicitors who lodged cases in 2017 come to you with a request to expedite, because of the time that they have already taken, you will agree to that.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
I have just one more question before Christopher Kerr comes in. Does the scenario that you have just described in which a problem is discovered later on have a much greater impact, because recourse for customers or clients has diminished over time?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
I have some questions about the backlog, which is a matter that I expect other members will want to come in on, too.
When you previously appeared before the committee and were asked about the backlog and how long it would take to clear, you said:
“three years”
or
“a little bit longer”—[Official Report, Economy and Fair Work Committee, 2 March 2022; c 10.]
You will have seen the letter from Mr Keith Robertson in which he has extrapolated some figures and—most critical of all—suggests that some cases lodged in 2017 will take 11 years to complete. First, where is Mr Robertson wrong? Indeed, is he wrong?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Publications)
Meeting date: 6 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
Does having other people fill in the form pose any further risks with regard to data?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Publications)
Meeting date: 6 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
Good morning to the panel—thank you for attending today. If you can bear with me, I want to return to your “Statement of data needs”, specifically in relation to the child disability payment. In the statement, you note—correctly—that,
“While ... sex and gender are sometimes used interchangeably”,
they actually meet different data needs. You also note, as has been referenced today,
“a long-term trend in child disability ... and a higher prevalence of certain conditions for”
males. Given that you have explained today that small errors can, over time, have quite a big impact, is there not a case—if you had your preference—for data on both sex and gender to be collected specifically for the child disability payment and, where appropriate, in other cases?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Publications)
Meeting date: 6 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
I want to ask about the equality form. I am very interested in data accuracy, too, but it seems to me that room for error is almost being built in here. Obviously it is inefficient to have, with the child disability payment, a two-step process in which you have to join data fields. Is that your view, too? Is that why you are stating that, ideally, you would for your data collection needs be looking to have everything on one form?
