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.
Criathragan Hide all filters
Displaying 3214 contributions
|
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Child Payment
Meeting date: 30 May 2024
John Mason
Ruth Boyle, Jack Evans is relaxed about having a complicated system, but we have already had suggestions about targeting disabled children, rural children, teenagers, babies, single parents and minority ethnic people. Would that not become horribly complicated, or is having a bit more targeting the way to go?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Child Payment
Meeting date: 30 May 2024
John Mason
My colleagues might follow up on some of what you have said, but I am interested in the fact that, even though we have a simple system at the moment—there is one figure across the board—the uptake is still quite low. My gut feeling is that, if we complicate it more, that might hit the uptake, but I will leave that one just now.
The other question involves tapering. Again, having the payment decrease as people’s income increases complicates matters, as it means that people or their employers have to feed in information. However, there is a kind of fairness about tapering, as it prevents people coming to a cliff edge where they lose everything at one go. Ruth Boyle, do you have any thoughts on that?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 30 May 2024
John Mason
Therefore, although you are changing some of the dates for when things are starting, there will not be any serious impact in the current year, 2024-25. Can you put any figure on that?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Child Payment
Meeting date: 30 May 2024
John Mason
Good morning. Jeremy Balfour asked you about increasing the Scottish child payment right across the board, but another suggestion has been that we should target it more at those in greatest need—for example, those in severe poverty or perhaps those living in rural areas, where there can be extra expenses. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Child Payment
Meeting date: 30 May 2024
John Mason
Mr Sinclair?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 30 May 2024
John Mason
Given that I am on the Finance and Public Administration Committee, you will not be surprised to hear that I want to ask about the financial effects that I read about in the policy note, which says that the Scottish Fiscal Commission has decided not to produce any forecasts because there will not be a material impact. However, will there be any financial impact as a result of the regulations?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Child Payment
Meeting date: 30 May 2024
John Mason
There is some one-off support for having a baby, is there not?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scotland’s Commissioner Landscape
Meeting date: 28 May 2024
John Mason
If I cannot ask you, I cannot think who else I would ask.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scotland’s Commissioner Landscape
Meeting date: 28 May 2024
John Mason
My understanding of the rapporteur model is that someone might be appointed for, say, five years. There might be an emphasis on children for five years and then perhaps an emphasis on older people.
Liz Smith suggested that we could somehow freeze the system, so the present unfairness would carry on but we would at least stop more unfairness coming in. We heard Age Scotland and others saying that if children need a commissioner, older people need one too—although it has to be said that older people have a vote. I am reluctant to go down that route and will not ask your opinion.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scotland’s Commissioner Landscape
Meeting date: 28 May 2024
John Mason
That is fair enough.
We have looked at scrutiny. The committees are meant to scrutinise each of the commissioners. There are seven commissioners at the moment, but there are also other outside bodies. For example, the Economy and Fair Work Committee scrutinises the Scottish National Investment Bank, and we scrutinise the Scottish Fiscal Commission—although, technically, it is not a commission for the purposes of our inquiry. It is not the case that each committee has just one or two such bodies to look at; there is already quite a landscape of bodies out there.
Does whether a body is called a “commission” or a “commissioner” make a difference? Children have a commissioner, rather than a commission. Does it matter whether it is a Government commission, such as His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary or His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons for Scotland? Those are Government commissions, whereas we have Parliament ones. That would make a difference from your point of view, because the corporate body would not scrutinise a Government commission, but would it make any difference in practice?
