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 2465 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of National Records of Scotland”
Meeting date: 20 January 2022
Willie Coffey
Yes. So, if people ignore the invitation to complete the census, they will still get a visit and a paper copy. That covers that.
What did you say earlier about the expected likely percentage? You talked about an all-paper or all-digital model, or a mix of paper and digital. Did you say that there is a drop-off in the response rate if you mix those models of inviting contributions from people?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of National Records of Scotland”
Meeting date: 20 January 2022
Willie Coffey
How do you envisage the census developing in the future? I know that we might be 10 years away from the next one, but do you see us continuing with the digital solution, mixed with paper? Will we continue to use that model in future?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 20 January 2022
Willie Coffey
That is very helpful. With regard to whether a proportion of the money was fraudulently obtained or disbursed in error, is any attempt being made to recover any of that money? Whether or not it was fraudulently obtained, are we in a process of trying to recover that, or is that just one of the casualties of the circumstances in which we found ourselves?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 20 January 2022
Willie Coffey
In asking my next question, I am thinking of one of the lessons that we have learned as an audit committee over the years. If local authorities are involved in a process such as this and something is going on—fraudulent claims to the authority, for instance—are they quick to share that intelligence among other authorities, so that they can be alerted to possible similar activities, or do they not do that? Have they even had have time to do that during the pandemic? It seems as though they might have done so and that they have collaborated fairly well to minimise the impact. Is that the case, would you say?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 20 January 2022
Willie Coffey
Thank you both for those answers.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of National Records of Scotland”
Meeting date: 20 January 2022
Willie Coffey
If a huge number of responses to the census are completed digitally and electronically, who has access to that data? Who owns it, and how secure is it? Can you talk us through that, please?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of National Records of Scotland”
Meeting date: 20 January 2022
Willie Coffey
With regard to online submission, can people do that in little bits and bobs rather than completing the form from start to finish in one go? Can they pick up a bit of it and review it later on, and then submit the whole thing at the end when it is complete? Can they take their time about it?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 20 January 2022
Willie Coffey
I will ask some questions relating to the Covid-19 business support scheme and the commentary in the consolidated accounts relating to fraud, potential and otherwise.
We know that, in trying to be as helpful as possible, the distributing of funds was a very quick process. We also know that that brought with it greater risks. Will you give us a little bit of an overview of how you feel that that process has gone?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee (Virtual)
National Planning Framework 4
Meeting date: 18 January 2022
Willie Coffey
I have been looking at the section in the NPF on central urban transformation action areas, in the context of the issue that I asked about earlier. The policy seems to be aimed at major
“disused sites, and areas that have been blighted by dereliction”.
I suppose that that means areas that are blighted by opencast mining and stuff like that. However, I was talking about our high streets and the blight of empty, abandoned and filthy shops that have trees and bushes growing out of them. I was thinking about the bits of abandoned land that we see in the urban envelope.
Am I barking up the wrong tree? Are powers to address such issues best left to other planning and enforcement policies, or can we reach out and tackle the issue through the proposals in the framework?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee (Virtual)
National Planning Framework 4
Meeting date: 18 January 2022
Willie Coffey
That was really thorough. Thank you. I am sure that my committee colleagues will pick out some of those items as the meeting goes on.
For my second question, I will pick out one issue. I have previously raised the issue of derelict shops, buildings and land, which you mentioned. Will NPF4 give local authorities more powers to deal with that? The breadth of NPF4 looks great—there are a lot of good things in there. However, what I see now as a local member and what I saw as a councillor for many years is derelict and abandoned shops, buildings and pieces of land, which local authorities have limited powers to effect change on—by serving amenity notices and so on—so that the environment is improved, particularly in our towns. Will the framework strengthen powers or provide additional powers that can contribute to the overall look and feel that our towns and villages might need to support them?
