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 1201 contributions
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Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 22 February 2023
Carol Mochan
Thank you.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 22 February 2023
Carol Mochan
I have been approached by people who, although they acknowledge that there has been some movement, consider that there is no great urgency to see the issue as a key priority. I have been asked to raise with the committee that having an islander on HIAL’s board should be a priority. Beatrice Wishart from Shetland has spoken to me about how the community there feels that it is imperative that that happens. I want to share that with the committee.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 22 February 2023
Carol Mochan
You spoke about the responsibility of local government to provide water for young people. I am interested to know to what extent that is monitored. Do we have any evidence that water is freely available and how well young people can access it?
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 22 February 2023
Carol Mochan
Similarly, my point is that it is very disappointing that we do not have a timeframe. There is a growing body of evidence that that is an important policy to progress. Commitments have been made on school meals but nothing has come forward. We should send a strongly worded letter to the minister asking that the Government please sets out an exact timeframe for the measure.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 22 February 2023
Carol Mochan
Was that the initial contact with the police?
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 22 February 2023
Carol Mochan
You talked about changes in the guidance. Do you know whether schools still give out disposable bottles or whether the provision is more sustainable now?
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
New Petitions
Meeting date: 22 February 2023
Carol Mochan
I am broadly supportive of the petition, and I have been approached by other members of the Parliament to suggest that we could seek further information on what happens within the school education system and how we could support proper education around what is often a sensitive issue for young people at school, particularly for young women. I would be keen to see whether we could get together some of the information and see how the issue is taken up in the school curriculum.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 22 February 2023
Carol Mochan
No, take your time.
Meeting of the Parliament
United Kingdom Income Inequality
Meeting date: 9 February 2023
Carol Mochan
The member may know that I attended the same event, which gave us some excellent food for thought about how we might move the economy forward and how we might encourage people and communities to be part of what we might describe as business, but which, through community wealth building, lets them be in charge of their own areas. Members will know that I am extremely positive about those ideas. The example was given of North Ayrshire Council leader Joe Cullinane. He has taken steps that I view as bold, but, in his view, he is just being fair about how we should run the economy for communities.
Where Emma Roddick and I disagree is that, in my view, leaving the UK is not the way to reduce income inequality. I suggest that delivering a Labour Government at Westminster—which would repeal anti-trade-union legislation, invest in services and communities and offer fairer jobs to people—would be a better way to achieve solidarity in how we run communities in the UK. Those jobs would be well-paid jobs in which workers, unlike under the current Scottish and UK Governments, would be treated with the respect that they deserve.
Indeed, before the cost of living crisis, the cost of living in more rural communities was already substantially higher than it was in their urban counterparts, yet the Scottish Government has continued to do little for those communities. Yesterday, Emma Roddick and Fergus Ewing highlighted that the Highlands have been deprived of transport links that they were promised in relation to connectivity around the A9.
Meeting of the Parliament
United Kingdom Income Inequality
Meeting date: 9 February 2023
Carol Mochan
I thank Emma Roddick for bringing the debate to the chamber, and I welcome her contribution. The idea that stood out in it and that has motivated me for my entire life is that we live in a poor society with some very rich people in it.
The wealth divide across the UK, including in Scotland, is absolutely shocking.
Emma Roddick is right to highlight the scale of income inequality in the UK relative to that in other countries in Europe. That has undoubtedly been exacerbated by the Tory-made cost of living crisis, which has made the poor poorer while multimillionaires record eye-watering profits. We cannot get away from that. There are eye-watering profits to be made and there is money in the system. We hear about that every day, and it is something that we must challenge. Wealth can and should be redistributed, and there are acknowledged fair, just and green ways to do that.
