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
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
John Mason
Mr Thomas, do you want to come in on that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
John Mason
In a business in, for example, the financial sector, would the level of transparency vary, so that, even if outsiders do not know why decisions were made, at least everyone in the business would know?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
John Mason
Following on from that, there is the whole question of short-term decision making against long-term decision making. We took evidence from New Zealand where the suggestion was that the civil servants have a requirement—it may be a statutory requirement—to produce some long-term options, rather than advice, to try and get a more long-term view. Dr Foster mentioned short-termism in her paper. Should we be more long term in our thinking? How do we make better long-term decisions?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
John Mason
Dr Foster, I was interested in a couple of points in your paper, one of which is about public engagement and consultation. You seem to suggest that, actually, the Scottish Parliament and Government consult quite a lot, but you then quote somebody else making the comment that
“media attention may be a stronger driver in Scotland than the majority of government agendas in other countries.”
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
John Mason
Well, you can tell me whether you agree or disagree.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
John Mason
To clarify, would that be like putting more money into accident and emergency instead of into preventative healthcare or anything like that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
John Mason
Yes. You have mentioned speed a number of times. Is it a strength of the private sector and a weakness of the public sector that you can make decisions more quickly?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
John Mason
Does that need legislation?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
John Mason
Absolutely.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
John Mason
Okay—thanks for that.
Mr Begbie, you talked about the inevitability of making mistakes. Does the private sector handle that better than the public sector? Is it better at learning from mistakes and so on?
