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 4037 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Thanks very much for that. I certainly feel that the committee has a role to challenge, certainly in our scrutiny function, so that is very much something that I would agree with.
I do not know how in-depth your individual experiences are but, in your experience of the civil service, do civil servants feel that they can challenge ministers? Clearly, individual relationships make a huge difference, and there will be different personalities and leadership styles. We are not trying to say that people should be in a certain box. Do you think that there is an ability to talk truth to power? Do you think that it is limited? Do you think that there should be more of that? What is the relationship of civil servants with that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
I call Douglas Lumsden, to be followed by Liz Smith.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
James Black, the Scottish Government interacts with a lot of organisations outside the Scottish Parliament. From speaking to a former minister, I understand that there is a sense of great weariness among some of those organisations that they are consulted almost to death but do not necessarily see the Government taking forward what they want within the timeframe they are asking for. That weariness perhaps comes from feeling a lack of real participation. Is that something that you have found? How can it be improved?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Do you think that, when the Scottish Government communicates with organisations that are looking for funding, it does so in as straightforward manner as it should? For example, one of my constituency organisations had a significant funding bid turned down and, when it asked why, it was told that the fund was heavily oversubscribed. That might have been true, but does that mean that the application was excellent but others were better? Was it just a poor application, or would it not have been an effective use of resources? It seems that organisations are not really told that. They might be told it on some occasions, but certainly on that occasion the organisation was not really told why it did not get the funding other than the fact that that was the size of the pot, this was the number of bids, and it was just not among the lucky ones that were selected. Do you think that such feedback could be improved?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Do you not think that the national performance framework has a role to play in that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Another argument between siloed and horizontal working is accountability, which Mark Taylor talked about. Who ultimately is accountable when people are working across departments?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
There are currently 8 million empty houses in Japan, and mid-range economic countries such as Bulgaria and other eastern European countries have huge out-migration, as well as massively falling birth rates, and they do not have the strong economies that we have, in relative terms.
There is an issue that I want to ask about before I bring in John Mason. When we discuss such matters, we keep talking about 16 to 64-year-olds. Why do we do that, given that the pension age is going to change and will be well above 65 for the bulk of the period that we are talking about?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Okay. I will now open out the session to Daniel Johnson, first of all, to be followed by Ross Greer.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
I prefer a dodecahedron to a circular cycle. What you are really saying is that the system is three dimensional, but it is portrayed as being two dimensional.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
That said, you have also made a number of criticisms of the UK Government, which we will not go into here. I note, though, the issue of diseconomies of scale with regard to decision making and your comment that, because of their relative size, Wales and Scotland perhaps have a greater opportunity than the UK to work in partnership with stakeholders.
I have one final question before I open things up. In the last sentence of your report, just before the references, you talk about
“how the Scottish Government could change in relation to what is feasible rather”
than
“restate the value of simplified models that do not exist.”
What would you change in that respect?
