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
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
One point that has come up many times—in fact, you have mentioned it yourself—is the concept of bringing in new policies and looking at what is already happening. Given that it looks like we will be fairly tight for money over the next few years, would you go so far as to say that the Scottish Government and local government should not make any new commitments or policies and should focus instead on what they are doing at the moment and try to do it as well as they can? Should we pull back on new initiatives?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
Eileen Rowand, all political parties make promises at elections—both at council level and at a national level—and we all want to do new things. Do you think we should cut back on the new things?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
A lot of ground has been covered already but, as you might have seen, one of the questions that I asked the previous panel of witnesses was whether the framework was too high level and whether it should have contained more detail. Perhaps I can ask the same question of this panel, starting with Mr Melhuish.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
I will ask the others for their responses to that question later, but another witness whom I previously quoted suggested that one way of giving more certainty over five years is to hold back money at the beginning, which means having less spending but allows a reserve to be built up in order to give a bit more certainty further down the line. Would you support such an approach?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
In response to Mr Johnson, you said that the UK Government has been floating some kind of tax on online retailers. Do you support such a move as something that would take pressure off our having to tax the shops in the street?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
Mr Bradley, would you like to respond to the general question whether the framework is too high level?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
I accept a lot of that—I totally accept that universities are doing good. I am very proud of the fact that we have some of the best universities in the world. I just think that, when the Scottish Government will be so tight for money over the next five years, we maybe need to see a little bit more financial contribution from universities.
I do not think that colleges, the NHS or local government holds reserves at such levels. I do not want to spend all my time on the University of Glasgow, but the creditors figure is £252 million in its previous accounts. That fine figure is presumably being used for investment. However, the cash and cash equivalents figure is £488 million and the investments figure is £247 million, so there appears to be a lot of extra money sitting there.
Would you not accept that, if the Scottish Government is tight for money, we need to concentrate on the colleges, the NHS and local government, and the universities really must tighten things up a little bit?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
Mirren Kelly, do you agree?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
That leads quite well on to my next question. I will start with Ms Rowand this time.
One of the submissions that we have received says that, in taking the five-year approach, the Scottish Government would not have to spend all its money now but could save some and put it into reserves to give more certainty towards the end of the five-year period. Following on from what you have just said, I have a feeling that, although that would give more certainty, local government and others would not be happy if we held a lot of money back.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Replacing European Union Structural Funds
Meeting date: 24 February 2022
John Mason
That is a fair answer—it is actually quite a good one. I will leave it at that.
