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 1524 contributions
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Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Role of Local Government in Delivering Net Zero
Meeting date: 27 September 2022
Fiona Hyslop
We are coming to the end of our inquiry, so it would be helpful if you could do that quite quickly.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Role of Local Government in Delivering Net Zero
Meeting date: 27 September 2022
Fiona Hyslop
What can and what is the Scottish Government doing to de-risk investments in net zero infrastructure? What barriers are preventing more successful partnerships between councils and private investors? How do you make sure that there are investable opportunities? The criticism that we have is that the propositions are not big enough, so who helps to resolve that situation?
Heat and transport are the big issues that we have to address, but not all heat is in council housing. There is also social housing and private sector housing. How will that be financed and how do we make sure that we have propositions of new finance models to make net zero happen? Is there any role whatsoever for local government in that? Is that what we can expect? Or, in a place-based approach, who will do it? There are big questions around that wider investability and how we leverage in the money. What role do local authorities have and what are you doing to support them? Do they have any responsibility whatsoever for private sector housing in a place-based approach to tackle net zero?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Role of Local Government in Delivering Net Zero
Meeting date: 20 September 2022
Fiona Hyslop
Andrew Burns, what is your view on the leveraging of private finance? Is there a conflict between councils being responsible for their own estate and, at the same time, saying that we need community and/or place-based investments? In that case, the council should also be leveraging private finance for things that are income generating or there is a source of income that is not generated from its own stock.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Role of Local Government in Delivering Net Zero
Meeting date: 20 September 2022
Fiona Hyslop
Stephen, bearing in mind that you identified issues around community bonds—private finance for communities—what is your view on the leveraging of private finance? Unfortunately, the committee had to cancel a visit to Linlithgow, where the council has already used private finance through a solar bond exercise.
You have talked about how to mobilise the workforce and expertise. If the big-ticket items are housing and transport, what can we do about the barriers that you see around private finance? What opportunities exist? Nobody is saying that we will be able to tackle net zero through public funding, even with the best will in the world.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Role of Local Government in Delivering Net Zero
Meeting date: 20 September 2022
Fiona Hyslop
David Hammond, you talked about there being a lot of collaboration already between officials. Do you think that anything else is needed to provide that co-production mechanism? We all agree that everyone needs to be involved—local government, national Government, the private sector and so on—but should that be done on a place basis? Is there a role for city deals? How do we put the approach into practice?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Role of Local Government in Delivering Net Zero
Meeting date: 20 September 2022
Fiona Hyslop
Thank you.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Role of Local Government in Delivering Net Zero
Meeting date: 20 September 2022
Fiona Hyslop
I appreciate that you have been in post for only two months, but our committee is about to produce a report and we are nearing the end of this question session, so it would be helpful to know what that mechanism would look like.
Silke Isbrand, do you want to come in, on the invitation of Councillor Macgregor?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Role of Local Government in Delivering Net Zero
Meeting date: 20 September 2022
Fiona Hyslop
Is there a tension between local government delivering net zero targets for its own estate and responsibilities and taking leadership with regard to a place-based approach? That touches on the issue about industrial emissions, which are not on the public sector side. Would a place-based solution require local authorities to have some sort of remit or responsibility in that area?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Role of Local Government in Delivering Net Zero
Meeting date: 20 September 2022
Fiona Hyslop
Good afternoon. I would like to talk about collaboration and co-ordination. Councillor Macgregor, what do we need to do first to improve collaboration and co-ordination between local government and central Government? In her written evidence, Louise Marix Evans said that there needs to be some kind of framework agreement or mechanism between different levels of government across the UK. Do you agree that that is needed or do you think that there is already sufficient co-ordination and collaboration?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Role of Local Government in Delivering Net Zero
Meeting date: 20 September 2022
Fiona Hyslop
In its written evidence, COSLA calls for a mechanism to be developed
“by which we can better manage the multiple decarbonisation challenges that we face, and their impact on the economy and society.”
We all know that that needs to happen; we want to know what you think that would look like in practice.
