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 1038 contributions
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Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Tess White
Okay. I am looking at the three protected characteristics that I mentioned—religion or belief, sex and gender reassignment. My understanding is that there is some concern at the police training college about the conflict of rights. Are you aware of that?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Tess White
You have not mentioned Police SEEN—the Police Sex Equality and Equity Network. Have you taken input from that group?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Tess White
If an employee or a group of employees has a concern about, let us say, the police training centre at Tulliallan, how would they raise that with you, the chief inspector or HR?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Tess White
I realise that it is a lot of work to look at all nine characteristics. You say that you are covering most of them, but looking at prioritising and focus areas, roughly 60 per cent of your workforce are women and 40 per cent are men, so are you doing impact assessments of the policies that you introduce in relation to, let us say, men and women and the other protected characteristics?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Tess White
If you have staff who are across each of the nine characteristics, which ones have you focused on first? Have you taken a Pareto approach in which you look at a critical few, or have you looked at all of them equally, and is there balance across all nine?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Tess White
To summarise, you have done equality impact assessments and risk assessments against the nine protected characteristics and you have looked at the risks that are associated with those in relation to the workplace setting. In response to my question about Police SEEN, you said that it has made a submission but you have not fully reviewed it or given that group feedback.
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Tess White
No, in terms of risk assessments. You are doing impact assessments for some of them, but how many? There are nine protected characteristics. My question is, which of those nine protected characteristics have you done impact assessments for? Have you done them for all nine, or just one or two of them?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Tess White
Nicky, I will come to you first. I am going to concentrate on three of the nine protected characteristics—religion or belief, sex and gender reassignment. In the equality impact assessment that you say has been done, did Police Scotland take into account the workplace regulations and the rights in the Equality Act 2010 to single-sex spaces when devising your transitioning at work policy?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Tess White
Of the nine protected characteristics, are there any that you have not focused on yet and that you will be looking at at some point?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Tess White
I want to look at the requirements for all employers—my interest comes from my own HR background. Have you looked at the adverse impact against any of those protected characteristics?
