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 2601 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Finances 2023-24 (Impact of Cost of Living and Public Service Reform)
Meeting date: 27 September 2022
John Mason
My constituency has a whole load of sandstone tenements, which are incredibly difficult to retrofit. I accept that it is expensive, but I sometimes wonder whether we should do more of it.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Finances 2023-24 (Impact of Cost of Living and Public Service Reform)
Meeting date: 27 September 2022
John Mason
I want to pursue that, because we have not touched on housing until now. What would be the practical impact on housing associations if the freeze continued beyond March and they had less income? Would you cut back on maintenance and things like that?
My other point is on capital expenditure. What is your thinking in that respect? We are going to build more houses, but should we be doing more on the retrofit side to try to improve heating costs and so on? Have we got the right balance between retrofit and building new houses? The Passivhaus approach comes into that; I have such buildings in my constituency, and they have been built to a very high standard, although I think that they were more expensive. How do we strike the right balance?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Finances 2023-24 (Impact of Cost of Living and Public Service Reform)
Meeting date: 27 September 2022
John Mason
I will stick to the same theme. As David Lonsdale is sitting next to me, I want to ask the Scottish Retail Consortium how it—
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Finances 2023-24 (Impact of Cost of Living and Public Service Reform)
Meeting date: 27 September 2022
John Mason
Oh, right. That is good timing.
If I understood the SRC’s submission, it would like business rates to be lower and it would probably like income tax to be lower, too, so that consumers have more money to spend in the shops. Would you, like Unison, take the view that we could raise some of our taxes to compensate for that? Where do you see the balance between raising taxes and losing money?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Finances 2023-24 (Impact of Cost of Living and Public Service Reform)
Meeting date: 27 September 2022
John Mason
I have another question, which is for Clare Reid from the SCDI. If I understood you correctly, you do not like the idea of fiscal drag, in which people effectively pay more tax because of inflation, for example. I think that your argument is that increasing productivity would be a better way of doing things. My question for you is more about timing. Even if we do improve productivity, we are probably talking about three, four, five or 10 years, whereas fiscal drag can help the finances now, can it not?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 22 September 2022
John Mason
I will start with a question for the OECD representative, whom the convener questioned earlier. I am interested in how other countries are thinking about future pandemics and Covid, and whether they are putting money into that area just now, given all the other pressures that we have been talking about. For example, we have talked in this committee about how much of a store of personal protective equipment we should be keeping in preparation for the next pandemic, and whether we should be keeping laboratories open and functioning, or mothballed, in preparation for future requirements when we do not need them right now. Can you give us a flavour, or some examples, of what other countries are doing in that regard?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 22 September 2022
John Mason
That is helpful. I will press you a little more on the specifics of Covid and being prepared for another pandemic. You suggest that, overall, countries are being sensible and are thinking through what cuts they would make. Are most countries protecting practical things such as PPE supply, laboratory availability and that kind of thing?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 22 September 2022
John Mason
To focus on social security—Mairi Spowage might want to come in on this—the Scottish Fiscal Commission has warned that if we are more generous on social security than the rest of the UK is, we will need to find that extra money from somewhere, and that looks like being quite a serious amount of money that would need to be trimmed off somewhere else. I will come to Mr Hardt in a minute on the issue of raising more money. Are you still comfortable that we should have that focus on social security?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 22 September 2022
John Mason
Perhaps I could come to Mairi Spowage on that point. To some extent, we have been warned about the potential costs of social security in future. Should we be worried about those, or can we cope with them?
11:00COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 22 September 2022
John Mason
That is helpful.
I will move to Dr Hardt now. I thought that your submission was good. I was interested that, earlier, you said that you were surprised that there was an acceptance of the fixed budget. I would like to explore that.
Your submission says that we should be doing both preventative spending and downstream spending. The big challenge is whether we can do both at one time. The Finance and Public Administration Committee has certainly spent a lot of time on that. You also refer to the Reform Scotland report entitled “Taxing Times. Why Scotland needs new, more and better taxes”, which I thought was excellent.
I know that the issue is not just about finances, but is your main argument that we should be raising more so that we could do both preventative and downstream spending?
