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 3226 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Kenneth Gibson
It will be lost twice next year because it is an on-going £160 million every year. It will be £320 million next year.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Proposed National Outcomes
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Kenneth Gibson
Okay, but economic growth is obviously important if we are going to provide the resources to do all that the Parliament wishes to do and, indeed, the Government wishes to do. There are concerns regarding the omission of explicit references to economic growth. For example, that led Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, which responded to the consultation, to say that it feels as if the Government has “downgraded” economic growth, which is exactly the opposite of the message that we want to convey, given that it is one of the four priorities, as you have already touched on.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Proposed National Outcomes
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Kenneth Gibson
You also touched on the UN sustainable development goals. Goal 1 is “No poverty”. It was unclear whether the national outcome seeks to reduce poverty because, in Scotland’s NPF, the national outcomes are more realistic about what will be achieved within a devolved setting. Is that the case?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Proposed National Outcomes
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Kenneth Gibson
One of the UN’s sustainable development goals is that there should be no poverty, whereas the Scottish Government’s aim is to reduce poverty. Is that because we cannot eliminate poverty within a devolved setting? Is that the reason for it, or is there another reason why the Scottish Government does not have the same goal as the UN?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Proposed National Outcomes
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Kenneth Gibson
Thank you. I will open up the session to colleagues round the table.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Proposed National Outcomes
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Kenneth Gibson
I think that Keith McDonald wants to come in. [Interruption.]
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Kenneth Gibson
I do not think that anyone doubts that having more money in people’s pockets is a good way of reducing poverty. However, local government and others are saying that, if the money went into their services, they would be able to provide more jobs, apart from anything else, which is the best way out of poverty.
Professor Heald said that
“being ‘progressive’ on social security and other cash benefits at the expense of public services expenditure will have an ‘anti-progressive’ effect because lower income groups have less access to substitute private services if satisfactory public services are not available.”
My concern is that local government is having to focus on its statutory obligations and, therefore, cannot support things such as employability services in the way that it wishes.
People are trapped on benefits—they might have more benefits now than they would otherwise have, but they are still trapped. We want to break that cycle of poverty. You know yourself, cabinet secretary, that the situation in Dundee is a particularly difficult one.
09:15Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Kenneth Gibson
Indeed—and so is the curriculum and how it is taught, and there is a whole debate to be had on that separately.
I can understand the Government’s position on flexibility, because everyone calls for flexibility. When we had the historic concordat between the Scottish Government and COSLA in 2007, local government often did things that the Government was not happy about, and the Government was getting blamed for decisions that were being taken at local authority level by other political parties that were running those local authorities.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Kenneth Gibson
I understand that there is some politics there, but I think that the flexibility issue is one that will not go away. I would hope that the Verity house agreement will allow greater flexibility to enable better service provision, with the resources that we have.
However, the Scottish Government can make savings in other areas. One thing that I have always been surprised about is that people can go to their general practitioner and get paracetamol. I asked a question about that and found that the cost of paracetamol that was prescribed in Scotland in 2022-23 was nearly £12 million, and that the average cost to see a doctor is £56, apparently. Other products such as Calpol and ibuprofen are also being prescribed. Surely we could save tens of millions of pounds from the medicines budget if things that are readily available in local pharmacies and, indeed, in supermarkets were no longer on the list of medicines that can be prescribed.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 October 2024
Kenneth Gibson
Research universities are concerned that the golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge sucks in a lot of venture capital. That is why I have raised issues such as proof of concept money in the chamber. We were told that £5 million of Scottish Government money would bring in some £200 million of private investment, but some predictions, such as those about the data-driven innovation initiative, have underestimated how much we could bring in.
The main issue is that we have the potential to take Scotland forward but we are falling behind the rest of the UK. Employment in high-tech areas will provide tax revenue for the Scottish Government to invest in anti-poverty initiatives and other measures, which would be a win-win all round. I am asking about where to invest limited resources to get the best return.
