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 2100 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Disabled Children and Young People (Transitions to Adulthood) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 February 2023
Bob Doris
Sure.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Disabled Children and Young People (Transitions to Adulthood) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 February 2023
Bob Doris
Could you come back to us on that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Disabled Children and Young People (Transitions to Adulthood) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 February 2023
Bob Doris
Okay.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Disabled Children and Young People (Transitions to Adulthood) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 February 2023
Bob Doris
That is reasonable.
Louise Storie, I apologise if I am misquoting you—I have got mixed up with the scribbles in front of me—but I think that you said that schools will have different priorities in relation to transitions, young people with more complex needs and the resource implications and resource pressures. You are generally supportive of the legislation, but, if resources are finite, might that prioritisation mean that some young people have plans on paper without the resources to make them meaningful, and that other young people with more complex needs get a more significant transition? Do you have any concerns about that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Disabled Children and Young People (Transitions to Adulthood) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 February 2023
Bob Doris
That is helpful. You want more consistent capturing of those with disabilities. We will talk more about that later.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Disabled Children and Young People (Transitions to Adulthood) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 February 2023
Bob Doris
Thank you. That is helpful. Those are very reasonable points.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Disabled Children and Young People (Transitions to Adulthood) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 February 2023
Bob Doris
Dr Whelan, you have spoken quite a lot about the real challenges for universities, such as the lateness of identifying which young person is going to which institution, the building of early transitional relationships and transitional plans being more difficult with higher education. Who should take the lead? This might be your opportunity to say that there is something that we could change, irrespective of the bill, to give universities more of a chance to build deeper, stronger, quicker and more meaningful relationships with young people before they go to university.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Disabled Children and Young People (Transitions to Adulthood) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 February 2023
Bob Doris
I am not remotely trying to be awkward. Just because additional resource may be required does not mean that it is not the right thing to do. I am just trying to tease out the realities of the legislation.
Dr Whelan, will you answer from a university perspective?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Correspondence (Net Zero Scrutiny)
Meeting date: 2 February 2023
Bob Doris
I found the correspondence to be informative in relation to the ambitions of the Conveners Group and the wider Parliament to embed the scrutiny of net zero into the work not just of the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee—I acknowledge its convener, Edward Mountain, who is with us today, as he is a member of this committee—but of all parliamentary committees as we scrutinise legislation.
However, the letter also said:
“The Group noted that it was important that the Scottish Government was able to provide essential data to facilitate this scrutiny work. With this in mind, you will have seen the correspondence that I have had with the Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero requesting better information on this; the Group will return to this at our meeting later this month.”
I have not seen that correspondence, and I am unaware of whether the Scottish Government has replied to it. I would like to see those two essential pieces of evidence before we make a specific commitment to do further work, or even decide what such further work might look like, in relation to our approach to any changing of standing orders or rules in the Parliament with regard to net zero.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Correspondence (Proxy Voting Scheme)
Meeting date: 2 February 2023
Bob Doris
This is specifically on the variation to the proxy voting scheme that the Presiding Officer is suggesting. Can I just check—I am sure that the answer is yes—that annex A, the letter from the Presiding Officer, is a publicly available document?
