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 825 contributions
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Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 30 October 2024
Murdo Fraser
Is it your general approach simply to balance your accounts year to year, so that you are not having to look at adjusting the level of fees to take account of fluctuations in market activity?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 30 October 2024
Murdo Fraser
Good morning. I should declare an interest. I am a member of the Law Society of Scotland, although not currently practising, and in my previous life spent many hours dealing with Registers of Scotland, in a very satisfactory manner, I should say. There are no complaints there.
My question is a follow-up to the question about finances. Before 2020, I think, ROS had built up a very substantial reserve, which, if I remember correctly, was well into the tens of millions. You will remember the exact figure. The Scottish Government came in and helped itself to that and took that money to be part of the consolidated accounts to spend on revenue. ROS has moved to a different model now and is no longer a trading fund. If we were suddenly to get a dramatic slump in the property market, you would not have those reserves to rely upon. The question that follows from that is, does that mean that you would have to go back to the Scottish Government to ask for resource to fill a potential black hole in your trading account?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 30 October 2024
Murdo Fraser
Thank you.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 30 October 2024
Murdo Fraser
That is helpful in contextualising it. I have one or two follow-up questions on specifics. On your KPIs, your target in March 2024 for first registrations was 80 per cent. However, your performance for July to September was just 66.6 per cent. Is there a reason why you are quite far off reaching the target?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 30 October 2024
Murdo Fraser
I want to move on to ask questions about your success in dealing with applications turnaround time. I was looking at the data that we have been provided with about your key performance indicators and how well you are meeting those. To contextualise this, it might be quite helpful if you gave us a flavour of how you are dealing with new applications in the context of the backlog that we have heard about. We have been told that the oldest case in the backlog goes back to February 2018. How do cases end up in the backlog? What are you doing to address that, and how does that interrelate with dealing quickly with new applications?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Programme for Government (Priorities)
Meeting date: 9 October 2024
Murdo Fraser
We could debate that issue all morning. As an addition to those figures, it would be interesting to see a breakdown of the demography of the people who are leaving Scotland and those who are coming in. If it is the case that people in their 20s and 30s are leaving and that those who are coming in are in their 40s and 50s, that would also tell us something interesting. [Interruption.]
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Programme for Government (Priorities)
Meeting date: 9 October 2024
Murdo Fraser
Good morning, Deputy First Minister and colleagues. I will ask a couple of budget-related questions. I enjoyed your exchange with Lorna Slater on economic growth. It is fair to say that, since you came back into Government, there has been something of a shift in the language in Government, and more of a focus on growth than was previously the case.
However, in recent years, we have seen negative impacts on the Scottish Government’s enterprise budgets—I remember asking your predecessor Neil Gray about that issue last year. The budgets of the enterprise agencies, of VisitScotland and of employability programmes suffered quite severe cuts in this year’s budget but also in those of previous years. I do not expect you to tell us what will be in the budget, but would you accept that, if there is a new focus on economic growth, further cuts in the very areas of the budget that would help to drive that growth will not be helpful?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Programme for Government (Priorities)
Meeting date: 9 October 2024
Murdo Fraser
Thank you. I dare say that we will see what is in the budget in due course.
Again, on budget-related issues—the convener touched on this in her questioning—the committee has received a lot of evidence on the tax differential. We heard about that when we went to Prestwick airport in the spring, and witnesses have talked to the committee about a Scottish premium that they must pay to workers to offset the higher taxes that are paid here. If what is in the newspapers is to be believed, the policy chairman of the City of London Corporation will speak to the First Minister today and will raise some of those issues. Would you accept that a further widening of the income tax differential would be counterproductive when it comes to the pursuit of economic growth?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Programme for Government (Priorities)
Meeting date: 9 October 2024
Murdo Fraser
I am glad that you mentioned the migration figures, because I had a detailed look at them this morning. You are absolutely right: in the year to the middle of 2023, the Scottish population increased by 0.8 per cent, based entirely on inward migration. For the same period, the population of the UK as a whole increased by 1 per cent, so Scotland lags behind the overall UK growth by 20 per cent. In your view, why is the Scottish population growing less fast than that of the UK as a whole?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Programme for Government (Priorities)
Meeting date: 9 October 2024
Murdo Fraser
Thank you, convener. I do not know whether we have access to that data.
I am conscious of time, but I would like to ask another question. When you gave evidence to the committee in May, I asked you about the new deal for business and how it was progressing. At that point, you said that you were constrained in what you could say about it, because of the purdah rules. Can you give us an update on the status of the implementation of the 78 recommendations in the new deal for business?
