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 3461 contributions
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Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
New Petitions
Meeting date: 29 June 2022
Jackson Carlaw
PE1934 is on developing an education resource on gender-based violence for all year groups in high school. It has been lodged by Craig Scoular on behalf of Greenfaulds high school rights and equalities committee. The petition calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to work with Education Scotland to develop such an educational resource. The resource should educate on the causes of gender-based violence and ensure that young people leave school with the tools to help them to create a safer society for women.
Statistics on gender-based violence are included in the petition background information. The petitioner states that
“educating our children will end any existing cycles of gender-based violence and prevent any new ones from starting.”
The Scottish Government’s response outlines existing resources and guidance that are relevant to the subject of the petition. They include learning about topics including, in primary school, gender-biased expectations, up to learning about sexual harassment and feminism in high school. It also states that the gender-based violence in schools working group will review existing resources, identify effective practice examples and develop new resources.
Based on the evidence that we have received on this important petition, do members have any comments or suggestions for action?
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
New Petitions
Meeting date: 29 June 2022
Jackson Carlaw
Shall we write to COSLA in the first instance?
Members indicated agreement.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 29 June 2022
Jackson Carlaw
In your case, you felt that the value of your lost child was quantified at £300, and that did not seem to you to represent a fair or just outcome.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 29 June 2022
Jackson Carlaw
The last of our continued petitions this morning is PE1917, which was lodged by Amy Stevenson and calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to provide full legal aid to all parents who are fighting for access to their child or children, regardless of income.
When we last considered the petition, on 18 May 2022, we agreed to write to the Scottish Government, seeking more information on the review of the legal aid system and on its plans for a provisional timetable for bringing forward the Legal Aid Reform (Scotland) Bill. Since then, we have received a response from the Scottish Government, which was included in our meeting papers for this morning. Do members have any suggestions about how we might respond accordingly?
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
New Petitions
Meeting date: 29 June 2022
Jackson Carlaw
PE1935 is to urge the Scottish Government to create a committee outside the Parliament to judge whether ministers have broken the ministerial code. The petition has been lodged by Dillon Crawford.
The petitioner considers that a committee of non-MSPs would be able to act independently because they would not be affiliated to a party. The Scottish Government’s submission details the process by which ministers are held to account. Ministers are bound by the Scottish ministerial code, and a group of independent advisers currently exists to provide the First Minister with advice on which to base judgments in relation to conduct.
I think that PE1935 is an interesting petition. It is obviously motivated by current events. I wonder whether, in the first instance, we might invite the Scottish Parliament information centre to do a little bit of further work on how the various Parliaments within the UK currently process and deal with such business. I do not know where the Scottish system fits in with the systems in Northern Ireland, Wales or the rest of the UK, and I think that the petitioner and the public probably feel that there is a slight lack of transparency about how the arrangements have arisen. It would be useful for us at least to pull that work together and look at it as we consider the petition further.
Are colleagues content with that?
Members indicated agreement.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
Jackson Carlaw
My experience is the same—I am not sure. At some stage, as virtual events become more commonplace, it might be useful for us, beyond the context of this discussion, to understand the material impact on the management and control of the outcome of the discussions.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
Jackson Carlaw
Thank you for that, Mr Whittle. Minister, do you and your colleagues want to pick up on that point? Given that our formal questioning has finished, we would also be happy to hear any concluding remarks that you want to make.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
New Petitions
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
Jackson Carlaw
Thank you. I wonder whether we might also write to some of the bodies that represent victims and survivors, just to call in aid to the argument and to get some understanding of their views on widening the eligibility criteria. They must be aware of the particular circumstances of the groups that are falling through the net, and might be able to identify others that they would say are in a similar situation. Do we agree to write to those bodies, together with the suggestions that have already been made?
Members indicated agreement.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
New Petitions
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
Jackson Carlaw
Thank you. It is an important petition; we will keep it open and see what progress we can make.
I will suspend the meeting briefly. The minister is now with us, so we will be able to discuss our final continued petition in a moment.
11:15 Meeting suspended.11:17 On resuming—
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
Jackson Carlaw
Hold on a second, Mr Whittle—what has overtaken Whitelee? It used to be the biggest.
