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 1189 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 14 December 2021
Liz Smith
Would it be fair to say that, given the transition to net zero and the prediction that the oil and gas industries will diminish further, the result will be on-going issues for the tax take. Is that your prediction?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 14 December 2021
Liz Smith
As you say, it is maybe an issue for the cabinet secretary in due course.
I will ask about what you said regarding the oil and gas situation. You said that it was one of the big factors affecting matters. To what extent to do you think that the decline in the oil and gas sector is having one of the biggest effects on reducing the tax take?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Liz Smith
How easy is it to understand whether the labour market problems have been caused by Brexit or by people not being willing—rather than not having the right skills—to take up the available jobs? How easy is it to drill down on that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Liz Smith
Professor Bean made some interesting comments in reference to the impending meeting with the MPC and what is focusing minds on inflation and, specifically, its causes. How easy is it to use economic data to home in on the cost-push factors in inflation and on demand-led inflation? In previous meetings on the economy, people have spoken to us about cost-push inflation being very strong.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Liz Smith
That is very interesting. In Scotland, there has been a significant problem in specific sectors such as hospitality and tourism, so I was interested in how such issues are measured.
My final questions are about the chancellor’s budget. He made the decision to be a bit more demand led—in other words, he wanted to ensure that public spending was at a higher level than it might have been—and to increase some taxes. Has the budget led to some increase in the demand side of the economy? Is it having an impact on inflationary pressure?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Liz Smith
Would it be correct to assume, therefore, that, because of some of the blockages in the system that you mentioned earlier—specifically, the tightness in the labour market and employers not being able to fill some of the available jobs—your understanding is that the expectation factor may be increasing?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Liz Smith
I have just one question. Quite a few of the witnesses who have appeared before this committee have indicated that they think that consumer behaviour has changed quite markedly under Covid. Do you have any way of estimating whether that change is likely to be permanent?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Liz Smith
Are there implications for savings patterns as well?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform and Christie Commission
Meeting date: 30 November 2021
Liz Smith
That raises an interesting question about how appropriate it is to set national targets. If a Government has made commitments on specific targets—we have all been guilty of talking in terms of targets—does that take away from the ability to home in on other areas of measurement and improvement that might deliver aspects of what the Christie commission recommended?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform and Christie Commission
Meeting date: 30 November 2021
Liz Smith
The argument is really interesting. During our evidence session on 9 November, we discussed with Professor Mitchell and the Auditor General the question of trust. These days—this is not a party-political point—trust in politics is not easily found, yet the public want to have a level of trust in the people who deliver their public services, whether that is education, health, transport or whatever it might be. Politics is not in a good place at the moment—partly because of the Covid situation, which is obviously nobody’s fault at all—and it is hard to find the same degree of trust as we previously had in systems and, dare I say, in politicians.
At the core of the debate is the extent to which we can improve the level of trust if the lines of accountability are proven to be pretty watertight and if people understand why decisions have been made and what they can do to ensure that those decisions are the right ones for delivering their public services. Do we need to foster that debate?
