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 2623 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 16 January 2024
John Mason
I will move on to another topic. I have had a fair bit of interaction with the hospitality sector recently, and it has been going on and on about how it wanted the kind of relief that was given in England. I think that England made a mistake in providing relief across the board, because it seems to me that some hospitality businesses are doing incredibly well.
I agree with your principle, as I understand it, of targeting some of the NDR relief at a specific sector. You have chosen to target the islands. Will you explain why that is your focus? Are there any other sectors that also need the relief?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 16 January 2024
John Mason
I will finish with a more general question. A number of suggestions have been made about how national outcomes and the national performance framework have informed the budget. Were those elements taken as the starting point for the budget or did they come in at the end? Was the tax advisory group part of forming the budget?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 16 January 2024
John Mason
I will pick up on one or two points that have been touched on already. Concerning the housing budget and the number of affordable houses to be built, it has been suggested that there might be more private investment coming in. Would that include giving lower grants? Obviously, the Government money goes into housing association grants, mainly. Are you thinking of reducing the level of grants so that there is more borrowing?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 16 January 2024
John Mason
Part of that, probably, is the embedding of sustainable development.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 16 January 2024
John Mason
I will not pursue that issue.
I assume that you are always looking at ways of saving money, doing things more efficiently and that kind of thing; indeed, efficiency has already been mentioned. I do not know how often the MSPs’ offices are cleaned, but I get the impression that someone goes into all the offices every night. I do not think that that is necessary. My office is fairly tidy, I think—indeed, people do not tidy it; they just clean it—but it appears that my desk gets rearranged every night. I wonder whether something like that could be reduced to, say, once a week.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 16 January 2024
John Mason
My final question is about the Parliament shop, which has not been mentioned so far. It occurred to me that there is a bit of a challenge in that respect, given that members of the public who might want to buy something from the shop have to come through the whole security system in order to get to it. Have you thought about making some of the products available in another shop on, for example, the Royal Mile, perhaps on a franchise basis, so that we could boost sales and maybe make a bit more profit from the shop?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 16 January 2024
John Mason
Lots of items on sale in the shop are attractive, such as the Parliament-branded chocolate, scarves and ties, which are presumably not available anywhere else, except online.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 16 January 2024
John Mason
Is that right?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 16 January 2024
John Mason
I will press you a little bit on that. Other people have argued that it would have been better to use that money to boost the Scottish child payment further because that would have targeted the poorest people. Am I not right in saying that the poorest people do not really pay council tax? A lot of ordinary people have had a 5, 6 or 7 per cent increase in their pension or their wages. They are paying that kind of increase for most things, albeit that they are paying more for energy. Yesterday, a constituent of mine came to my surgery and said that they were happy to pay a bit more council tax.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 16 January 2024
John Mason
On a different subject, I go back to capital expenditure. Some of the amounts involved are quite small in the scheme of things but, over the past couple of days, concern has been expressed about SPT, which you said has considerable reserves. From a quick look at its accounts, I think that it has only £12 million of what it calls non-earmarked reserves, which is not a huge amount for an organisation with a turnover of £74 million. It has been suggested that, if SPT does not have funding to put in, work at East Kilbride station might have to be delayed. An example that affects my area is that Clyde Gateway is losing its core capital funding of £5 million, which could put a project at Shawfield in jeopardy. Can those projects still go ahead?
