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 1078 contributions
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Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Disability Benefit Processing Times
Meeting date: 29 June 2023
Paul O'Kane
This is similar to Katy Clark’s request: it would be useful if the committee could be updated on progress with that, if there is willingness to do so.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Child Poverty and Parental Employment Inquiry
Meeting date: 29 June 2023
Paul O'Kane
I want to expand on the conversation about rural locations and ask about childcare more broadly. A lot of the conversations in the committee have been about the expansion of funded childcare to 1,140 hours a year. Discussions are on-going about how that might be widened to include one and two-year-olds. Does the panel have a view on whether further state-funded childcare would be beneficial? How can we ensure that flexibility?
I am not sure who wants to come in on that. Rachel Hunter was on a roll.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Child Poverty and Parental Employment Inquiry
Meeting date: 29 June 2023
Paul O'Kane
No, convener. In the interests of time, I am happy to hand back to you.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Disability Benefit Processing Times
Meeting date: 29 June 2023
Paul O'Kane
If I may, convener, I will ask another question. David, you mentioned that you expect to see call waiting times coming down. Do you have a timescale to work to for bringing them down? Do you have targets for that so that we will be able to analyse what improvement looks like?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Disability Benefit Processing Times
Meeting date: 29 June 2023
Paul O'Kane
How are processing times impacting on clients? What is the view of the impact that they are having, and how does Social Security Scotland keep people informed and updated throughout the process, while they are waiting? Is there regular communication? Are there set points in the process at which communication is proactive?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Child Poverty and Parental Employment Inquiry
Meeting date: 22 June 2023
Paul O'Kane
I am grateful, convener. I have a quick question for Andrea on the place of lifelong learning in trade unions. What more can we do in that space so that trade unions have the resource that they need to support workers to learn in the workplace and have protected time to do that, essentially?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Child Poverty and Parental Employment Inquiry
Meeting date: 22 June 2023
Paul O'Kane
Good morning, members of the panel. We are particularly interested in what is happening just now, what types of flexibilities are required and to what extent those flexibilities are available to low-income parents. As the convener has asked us to be specific, I direct the question to Jane van Zyl first. What is currently happening, and where are the flexibilities?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Child Poverty and Parental Employment Inquiry
Meeting date: 22 June 2023
Paul O'Kane
The key part of the question is how available are the flexibilities for parents, particularly parents who are on low incomes? Are there practical examples that you can share of where things work well?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Child Poverty and Parental Employment Inquiry
Meeting date: 22 June 2023
Paul O'Kane
Will you expand on what the effective ways of introducing flexibility are, particularly where there are significant challenges on the ground? I am keen to bring in other members of the panel. Nikki Slowey might want to comment on how we grow flexibility.
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Asylum Seekers in Scotland
Meeting date: 20 June 2023
Paul O'Kane
We certainly recognise much of what you have said, and I echo your comments about the excellent support provided by organisations, especially in the charitable sector, whose representatives felt, sometimes, that there were barriers to accessing hotels, because of many of the issues that you have mentioned.
I have a question about the use of hotels making people more identifiable, with reference to the risk of human trafficking and exploitation. Do you feel that use of hotels has created such a risk? Because we know where people are, they become more of a target, in a sense.
