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 1294 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Liz Smith
On the outcome agreements that are established between individual universities and the Scottish Funding Council, is what you enunciated exactly the main concern of individual universities as they approach their discussions with the SFC about determining outcomes? Do they all share the view that that is where potential problems could hit hardest?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Liz Smith
Finally, when it comes to being at the cutting edge of innovation and research, where Scottish universities have punched well above their weight for a very long time, is there evidence that Scottish universities are finding that more difficult? In other words, is there evidence that the knowledge exchange that you spoke about and international co-operation, which has been absolutely crucial to many universities in Scotland, particularly in the past two decades, are being undermined due to the funding situation?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Liz Smith
Ms Rowand, when you talked about the opportunity cost of developing a new social care system, you said that we had to bear in mind not just the cost of introducing a new system but the fact that resources might have to be taken away from elsewhere. Can you expand on that? Are you saying that any new system will create an additional administrative burden or do you foresee some of the social care services that are provided on the ground being changed or removed?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Liz Smith
Thank you very much.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Liz Smith
Indeed, and thank you very much for those helpful answers.
Ms Kelly, given what has been said, am I right in thinking that COSLA’s position is that some of the change to a national care service could be extremely difficult as far as the current services are concerned?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Liz Smith
Mr Sim, I hope that you will not mind if I continue with questions on exactly that theme.
In your submission, you were very clear that one of the issues that worry you is that things such as research, innovation and artificial intelligence are now classified on the capital side of spend, rather than the resource side, and that the national performance framework concentrates on the latter.
I think that all of us in Parliament would argue that research and development is one of the great strengths of Scotland’s university sector. Earlier, you mentioned that Scotland is able to attract absolutely the finest people. What would you like to see being done in recognition of that? It is obviously one of the sustaining factors of the sector.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Replacing European Union Structural Funds
Meeting date: 24 February 2022
Liz Smith
This question is much more technical—I apologise for that—but it is important. You set out in your letter the methodology that has been used to measure the areas that you believe are most in need. That methodology is also on the UK Government website and is largely based on the indices that the Office for National Statistics produced.
When the Scottish Government makes an assessment of the areas that it thinks are most in need, it uses the formal Scottish Fiscal Commission budget analysis and estimates, with some based on ONS input and others not. I want to check that the UK Government’s assessment of the areas that are most in need—that is, the methodology that you use—does not use data that is different from the data that is used when it comes to the Scottish economy. If there was different data, there could be different interpretations.
A conclusion from our budget report was that the Scottish economy sometimes suffers from the Scottish Fiscal Commission and the Office for Budget Responsibility having different timescales. Are you confident that the methodology that is being used to decide which areas are most in need uses a formula agreed by both Governments?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Replacing European Union Structural Funds
Meeting date: 24 February 2022
Liz Smith
That is very helpful. Is it your understanding that that would be done on an independent basis for all spending across the UK?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Replacing European Union Structural Funds
Meeting date: 24 February 2022
Liz Smith
I reference the fact that the co-operation on deals such as the Tay cities deal was absolutely first class, because everybody was on the same page. The UK Government, the Scottish Government, local authorities and local interest groups were on the same page with regard to what the ambitions were for the Tay cities project, and I think that that was true of the other city deals, too.
If there was a slight difference between the Scottish Government’s priorities through the national performance framework and those of the UK Government, how would that be resolved to the satisfaction of both Governments?
14:00Finance and Public Administration Committee
Replacing European Union Structural Funds
Meeting date: 24 February 2022
Liz Smith
Secretary of state, you will be aware that the committee has recently published its report on the budget for 2022-23. It was a unanimous report. Not only does it flag up quite a lot of concerns about the Scottish economy, it raises concerns about the budget process. One of the conclusions in that report is that there is not sufficient transparency between the UK Government and the Scottish Government about where the income streams come from and, just as important, where they are being spent. Those points were also raised by people who gave evidence to the committee during our scrutiny of the budget.
On the three new funds that we are discussing, are you confident that both Governments are absolutely clear about the amounts of money that are available and what the timescales are?
