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 2692 contributions
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Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Channel 4
Meeting date: 23 June 2022
Mark Ruskell
I ask Nicole Kleeman for her reflections on the international work.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Channel 4
Meeting date: 23 June 2022
Mark Ruskell
What would be the impact of privatisation on those international sales?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Channel 4
Meeting date: 23 June 2022
Mark Ruskell
Can I just confirm that, as you said earlier, there is no impact assessment from the UK Government of the pros and cons and of issues to do with international work?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Channel 4
Meeting date: 23 June 2022
Mark Ruskell
Thank you for joining us this morning. We heard from the first panel about the status of Channel 4 overseas, the high regard that the channel and its productions are seen in and how the independent sectors are a key driver of that success. I wanted to ask you the same question that I asked the first panel: how might privatisation affect that international work and that international standing of the channel and what it produces?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Channel 4
Meeting date: 23 June 2022
Mark Ruskell
We have heard some pretty sobering thoughts from the panel already. I turn to the international work that Screen Scotland does. Obviously, we will see increased investment in Screen Scotland for its international engagement work. How would the privatisation of Channel 4 affect that?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scotland’s Census
Meeting date: 23 June 2022
Mark Ruskell
If you had to sum it up in one word, would you say that there was a sense of fatigue?
Meeting of the Commission
Audit Scotland Annual Report and Accounts for the Year to 31 March 2022 and Auditor’s Report on the Accounts
Meeting date: 22 June 2022
Mark Ruskell
Thank you.
Meeting of the Commission
Audit Scotland Annual Report and Accounts for the Year to 31 March 2022 and Auditor’s Report on the Accounts
Meeting date: 22 June 2022
Mark Ruskell
Alan and Stephen, both of you have mentioned the importance of wellbeing among staff. Stephen, I think that you said that empathy and resilience are strong values. I am trying to contrast that with quite a stark figure for the level of staff turnover, which I think has gone up from 5.1 to 9.4 per cent over the past year.
Is that a bit of a red light for you? What is the story underneath that turnover? What themes are coming out of the exit interviews with staff? Are there issues underlying the decimation of people in the industry or where they want to go next? I am trying to second-guess what those issues are. Is it a natural consequence of Covid that people are now thinking about the next position in their careers? I do not know. It is tempting to look at a figure like that and hear alarm bells. What is the story behind that? On the face of it, you are losing people.
Meeting of the Commission
Audit Scotland Annual Report and Accounts for the Year to 31 March 2022 and Auditor’s Report on the Accounts
Meeting date: 22 June 2022
Mark Ruskell
Okay. It was useful to unpack that. I am much more reassured now.
You mentioned the staff surveys—the pulse surveys and the wider annual surveys. One thing that has come out of that is a series of graphs comparing Audit Scotland with appointed firms.
Whether it is easy to make an exact equivalence in that respect is, I suppose, debatable, but on the face of it, staff in all those firms—and, indeed, your organisation—say that they all feel relatively well encouraged and supported in doing their work. However, there seems to be a bit of a gap between Audit Scotland and the appointed firms with regard to the resources that you have, and a noticeable gap between what Audit Scotland staff and staff at the appointed firms are saying about training and development, with the latter seeming to be more satisfied in both areas. What is your response to that issue, given that it seems to be flashing amber, if not red?
Meeting of the Commission
Audit Scotland Annual Report and Accounts for the Year to 31 March 2022 and Auditor’s Report on the Accounts
Meeting date: 22 June 2022
Mark Ruskell
This might seem counterintuitive, but would a four-day week benefit your organisation? After all, in the majority of cases in which such an approach has been implemented, productivity has improved. You might well think that you are at a point at which productivity cannot increase any more, but if you are talking about staff wanting to reutilise their skills and move more flexibly around the organisation, I think that there would be some opportunities in that respect. Has that been looked at in the context of your organisation?
