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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.

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.

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Displaying 3511 contributions

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Finance and Public Administration Committee

Budget Scrutiny 2024-25

Meeting date: 16 January 2024

Jackson Carlaw

We certainly do not have a window sticker that says, “You must spend your budget”. It is open to members to determine that.

Very often, the uptake happens because of in-year changes. Staff leave, and it then takes quite a period of time for them to be replaced. For example, in my own office, a highly paid member of staff left unexpectedly, and there was a period of time in which I reassessed whether I wanted to replace that individual in quite the same way. It has meant that, in this particular year, my own utilisation of the staff provision will be less than it has been in other years. That kind of reality will apply across most parliamentary offices, making it unlikely that we would ever have a year in which there would be a 100 per cent utilisation of the overall budget.

We have worked out that 93 per cent figure by looking at experience over the years, particularly the mid-years of a parliamentary session. Obviously, in the first year of a session, the figure will usually be less than that, because there will be a lot of new members who will not have any staff at all and will be in the business of recruiting them. It therefore seems relatively reasonable to look at the mid-years of the Parliament if we are looking to pitch things at the required level.

Finance and Public Administration Committee

Budget Scrutiny 2024-25

Meeting date: 16 January 2024

Jackson Carlaw

I do not think that there is ever a year zero in examining such issues. The process is on-going, but changes that we make often lead to consequential opportunities.

Finance and Public Administration Committee

Budget Scrutiny 2024-25

Meeting date: 16 January 2024

Jackson Carlaw

However, we have interrogated requests for additional moneys to fund particular projects, some of which we have asked to be deferred or to be looked at again.

Finance and Public Administration Committee

Budget Scrutiny 2024-25

Meeting date: 16 January 2024

Jackson Carlaw

Thank you for that trenchantly-put sequence of observations. I will come to David McGill in a moment, but the first thing to say is that percentage increases can look quite sensational in relation to some relatively small budgets.

As you know, the corporate body has discussed with the committee the overall expansion and principal understanding of what office-holders are doing, and we are grateful for the inquiry that you now have under way. However, the corporate body’s responsibility is not to editorialise, but to enact the will of Parliament; that is why, Parliament having decided that the office-holders shall exist, our responsibility is to ensure that they are able to undertake and dispose of their functions effectively. Some of them have had additional responsibilities applied to them and some have made budget submissions that Huw Williams and Janice Crerar, who operate with the office-holders on a daily basis, have interrogated, and which the corporate body has declined to accept.

It is therefore not the case that the budget before you has not been scrutinised, analysed, interrogated and, in some cases, declined. However, some of the office-holders still have relatively low overall costs such that, when you apply a percentage, it can look quite significant, although it could, in fact, be the case that just one additional employee or partial employee has been added to it.

I will allow David to expand on that.

Finance and Public Administration Committee

Budget Scrutiny 2024-25

Meeting date: 16 January 2024

Jackson Carlaw

You identify the two key issues. The latter is the one that I wrestle with, because it is not clear to me that any overarching body is looking holistically at the office-holder landscape. The corporate body’s responsibility is to enact the will of Parliament. The Scottish Government can propose the establishment of commissioners. Members of the Scottish Parliament can propose the establishment of commissioners through members’ bills.

In my experience, every one of those proposals has been considered in isolation in relation to the actual proposal before Parliament, but never in terms of the overall landscape. In the most recent debate, I, on behalf of the corporate body, tried to introduce that point into the discussion on the patient safety commissioner. It becomes very difficult in a debate about progressing legislation in respect of a particular commissioner, when everything in that debate is about the merits of the position in question, to have a wider discussion about what Parliament is doing in the round, seeking to do or prioritising. Even if you were to argue in favour of commissioners, we are considering those issues not in any structured way but on the basis of who is proposing what at any given moment in time.

Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee