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 1200 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 2 May 2023
Liz Smith
That is an interesting point and an astute observation. Is it a part of the problem that the available data is not as good as it should be?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 2 May 2023
Liz Smith
When the Fraser of Allander Institute, the Carnegie Trust and Audit Scotland came before us, they were all clear about the paramount need for clarity of purpose in policy making—that was pretty much the first thing that they all said. In your relationships with Government, when you have assisted with policy, have you felt that that clarity of purpose was there in each case? If not, can you give us an idea of what the problem was?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 2 May 2023
Liz Smith
Just on that point, with reference to what Lucy Hughes said, when a policy transcends several Government portfolios—for example, children and young people, or planning—how easy is it to get a common agreement on the delivery of the policy if there are conflicting problems?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 2 May 2023
Liz Smith
Does anyone else have any comments on that issue?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 2 May 2023
Liz Smith
That is interesting, in light of some of the comments that we have picked up in private session—so no names attached—from former civil servants and former ministers. That has been highlighted in The Times newspaper this morning.
Because of the difficulties that you have just cited, do decisions sometimes have to be rushed, and not enough time devoted to thinking through—to pick up on Craig McLaren’s point—exactly how things will be manifested in policy making. Is that a problem?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 18 April 2023
Liz Smith
Thank you.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 18 April 2023
Liz Smith
I have just one question. If a piece of legislation has not worked very well and has lots of problems, how effective is the post-legislative scrutiny in the Parliament? Would your group ever be involved in considering why a policy commitment has not worked very well?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Liz Smith
Your first example about biodiversity is a classic example, because the data that you need will not exist until years from now. That might be slightly different from the business case for deciding on business rates or whatever, because that detail potentially exists, although you might not have it. In the case of biodiversity, the data that you need on which to base policy might not come for another five or 10 years. An example of that is moorlands—we were having that debate last year or the year before. To what extent is that a serious problem for the Government in devising policy? Effectively, there is nothing that it can do to get that data.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Liz Smith
I do not think that there is much scope to be able to reduce costs. As you rightly say, if we want a world-class health service, costs are going to rise in that sector more than they will in the rest of the economy. That has been the nature of health service costs for a long time.
Is there scope for reform elsewhere, in the non-health, non-social security aspects of the economy, that could help us to make some savings?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Liz Smith
I will come to other two gentlemen, but first, when you say that there is a case for making better use of the existing data, what is it that acts as a barrier to doing that?
