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 2867 contributions
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COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 19 January 2023
John Mason
It would be fair to say that we have struggled with that.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 19 January 2023
John Mason
On a slightly different issue, we have just had an evidence session with the OECD. You came in straight after the session, so I do not know whether you were able to see any of it. There was quite an interesting discussion around spending reviews, in which we established that the OECD’s definition of a spending review is slightly different from ours. Its definition is based more on the fact that other countries look at specific areas. For example, Germany had a spending review of transport that really looked in depth at what the Government was already spending, to see whether it could make savings and move forward.
I asked the witnesses whether we could learn from that. For example, we could look at the health service and say, “We are spending all this money on reactive care, but we would like to move more into preventative primary care.” The feeling overall was that maybe we could learn from other countries. Is there anything in that space? I realise that that is a new topic, but can we do anything about examining present expenditure to see whether we can free up more of it? Are we already doing that?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 19 January 2023
John Mason
On that point, it was previously suggested that the public sector staff numbers, as a whole, would go back to pre-Covid levels. Has that commitment been affected by the pay increases?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Monitoring Covid-19 Recovery
Meeting date: 19 January 2023
John Mason
Thanks very much.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate legislation
Meeting date: 17 January 2023
John Mason
My example would be better with higher figures at which the tax would come into play but, because I live in a property that is valued at less than £100,000, I tend to think of figures in that direction.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate legislation
Meeting date: 17 January 2023
John Mason
The point remains that it is clearly an advantage for first-time buyers if their competitors basically have less money to compete with them.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate legislation
Meeting date: 17 January 2023
John Mason
I realise that you do not want to stray beyond your remit, but a lot of constituents who are in the private rented sector and definitely do not want to be in it come to me. They are there because it is the last resort for them. They cannot get an RSL house and they cannot afford to buy. Anything that moves the balance a little bit towards the first-time buyer and away from the private rented sector, even if it is only 2 per cent, has to be a good thing for my constituents.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate legislation
Meeting date: 17 January 2023
John Mason
We have covered quite a lot of ground already, but I will just go over one or two points again. To take some figures as an example, if a second home buyer or somebody who intends to buy to let has a budget of, say, £104,000, at present that would be £100,000 for the property and £4,000 for tax. If we put the tax up to 6 per cent, that would mean that that person has only £98,000 to pay for the property and £6,000 for tax, roughly. Therefore, the house price comes down by £2,000 and competitors, such as first-time buyers, will be advantaged because they will have to beat a lower figure to get the property. It seems obvious to me that this will benefit first-time buyers. Is my logic roughly correct?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate legislation
Meeting date: 17 January 2023
John Mason
On another angle, we asked where the money should come from otherwise to make up the difference—I think that it was £34 million—and one or two of the people who responded to us broadly said, “That is nothing to do with us.” How do you respond to somebody like that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate legislation
Meeting date: 17 January 2023
John Mason
When I was younger, it was almost assumed that, if a person had a reasonably decent job, they would try to buy a flat and perhaps then a house. That was quite normal. However, I am afraid that that has changed. There are various reasons for that. As Ross Greer said, one is that people from cities who want to be second-home owners can go to rural areas—for example, those from Glasgow can go to Fife—and outbid local workers who are not on a great salary. In cities, the problem is that young people cannot compete with people who are buying to let, so anything that we can do to redress that balance and help younger people who are struggling to get on to the housing ladder has to be positive. This is only a small change—we are talking about 2 per cent, which is not a big deal in many ways.
