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 1515 contributions
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Economy and Fair Work Committee
Economic Recovery
Meeting date: 22 September 2021
Michelle Thomson
Where stuff is shipped out of some of your other ports down south, do you have a sense of the percentage of leakage?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
Michelle Thomson
The just transition commission made a statement about moving beyond gross domestic product as a measure of Scotland’s progress. We have all wrestled with GDP being a crude but internationally recognised measure. How might you be able to move beyond it and how might that play into the work of other agencies, such as the Scottish Fiscal Commission? At a previous meeting, I asked witnesses from the SFC how they reflected the risks of climate change in doing their forecasts. I appreciate that the matter is complex, but I would also appreciate your latest thinking on that complexity, particularly in regard to GDP and other measures.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
Michelle Thomson
Given the undoubted complexities that have been introduced by Covid and Brexit, and the challenging themes around net zero, just transition, human rights, equalities and wellbeing, what plans—if any—are you able to outline today with regard to your thinking about how you might develop the NPF?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
Michelle Thomson
Like you, Mr Swinney, we are all aware of the NPF’s history and development; I accord it value in and of itself, while understanding how it started. However, when I went through the NPF, I found that it was incredibly difficult to derive any meaning from an assessment of whether performance was maintaining or worsening.
In reading anything, I look first for an outline of the methodology. You might not want to give a multitude of data sets away, but I had no sense of how you arrived at the conclusions. From an academic perspective, if I read anything with no sense of the methodology that is used, I am inclined to ask, “How do I know that this is true?” That follows on from Daniel Johnson’s point. Would you, in considering the NPF’s development, be prepared to set out some indication of the methodology as an aid?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
Michelle Thomson
To evaluate where we are, there has been a lot of debate since the starting point, which you recall, on determining the value that is added by public spend and, therefore, arriving at the national performance framework. I appreciate the complexity, but do you see a further drift towards making the link between public spend and outcomes, or do you largely conclude that that is incredibly complex—a view with which I have a lot of sympathy—and that we will carry on as we are with a broad framework? That relates to a point that Daniel Thomson made.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Economic Recovery
Meeting date: 15 September 2021
Michelle Thomson
Thank you. Malcolm Roughead, would you like to come in at this point?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Economic Recovery
Meeting date: 15 September 2021
Michelle Thomson
First, I will take us back a bit and explore budget positions. You have submitted written information, so I want to keep this snappy. I am interested in getting a brief summary of what both organisations believe their current budget positions to be. It might be more appropriate for Douglas Colquhoun to comment on behalf of Scottish Enterprise. You will be looking at next year in the light of a very uncertain trading environment for everybody. I am particularly interested in the forward-looking aspect, the mitigations that you are anticipating and your confidence in them, given the uncertainty about Scottish Government funding.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Economic Recovery
Meeting date: 15 September 2021
Michelle Thomson
That is very helpful. Thank you.
I want to bring in Jane Morrison-Ross and Carroll Buxton. Nick Kenton used a term “golden threads”. One of my golden threads to obtain diversity in our economic output is ensuring that women-led businesses are adequately represented. There has been a lot of chat. We know that women have been disproportionately affected, and I suspect that women-led businesses have been disproportionately affected. I would like Jane Morrison-Ross’s and Carroll Buxton’s observations on that.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Economic Recovery
Meeting date: 15 September 2021
Michelle Thomson
I will start with a question for the two directors of finance—Anthony Daye and Nick Kenton. You may have seen that, in the previous panel session, I wanted to explore the extent to which people are confident about their projections for next year’s budget, given the considerable uncertainty, what had been looked at in scenario planning, and their confidence level around that. Please keep your answers brief. I do not need to go through every single budget line; I simply want to get a sense of where you are at with that.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Economic Recovery
Meeting date: 15 September 2021
Michelle Thomson
Yes, it does—thank you.
I appreciate that Malcolm Roughead, given his role, might want to take it up a level. Please give me a sense of your current budget position, your future projections and your confidence level.
