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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COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Ministerial Statement, Coronavirus Act Reports and Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 16 September 2021
John Mason
That was helpful. Professor Leitch, do you wish to add anything?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Vaccination Certification
Meeting date: 16 September 2021
John Mason
I take your point that, in a sense, the wider the system, the simpler it is. I understand that the idea was that the system should be quite narrow so that it affects fewer people. Is it your argument that it would be better to say that people will need certification to get into any premises that serve alcohol and are open after a certain time—say, midnight? That would include not only nightclubs but pubs and restaurants.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Vaccination Certification
Meeting date: 16 September 2021
John Mason
Mr Stevenson, you were laying it on pretty thick that this is going to be impossible to do, but the reality is that loads of other countries have vaccination passports. I think that Greece started its system in July, and France, Switzerland and many others have such a system. They seem to have managed it, so what is the big problem here?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Vaccination Certification
Meeting date: 16 September 2021
John Mason
My next question is for Dr McMillan from the Law Society. I was interested in what your submission says about the concept of discrimination. You suggested that there had been a case—I will not even try to pronounce it, but it was in the Czech Republic—in which the courts said that it was not discrimination and that it is legal to have passports, certificates or something along those lines. That case particularly affected children.
On the other hand, you raise the point that introduction of a certificate could be discrimination under the Equality Act 2010 because certain groups have not been vaccinated. Will you tell us where you are with that? Is the law changing? Are we uncertain?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Ministerial Statement, Coronavirus Act Reports and Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 16 September 2021
John Mason
My understanding is that quite a few countries have used vaccination certificates already, so I presume that we can learn from them. For example, I understand that Greece announced its scheme on 28 May and that there was a big uptake of vaccinations in June before the certificates came into operation in July. I do not know whether you saw the previous evidence session; in it, Mr Doncaster argued that we should be more like France, where vaccination certificates are required for entry everywhere, so that the scheme would be simple and understood by everyone. What have we learned from other countries’ experiences?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Ministerial Statement, Coronavirus Act Reports and Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 16 September 2021
John Mason
As an extension to that point, if hospital numbers were to fall dramatically over the next fortnight, would we just forget about certificates?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Ministerial Statement, Coronavirus Act Reports and Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 16 September 2021
John Mason
Previous witnesses talked about the expense of apps and checking people as they go into venues. My experience—I think that people know this—as a Clyde Football Club supporter, is that my season ticket is on an app that is checked when I walk in. There is no problem—the staff use their own phones for doing that, and there does not seem to be an issue. What is your response to the point about the cost to businesses?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Ministerial Statement, Coronavirus Act Reports and Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 16 September 2021
John Mason
On exemptions, a constituent of mine has a range of health problems but, as I understand it, her general practitioner and clinicians have not yet decided whether it is wise for her to get the vaccine. That is a purely medical decision, but where does that leave her? Do we press the clinicians to make the decision, or will she just be restricted in where she can go?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Vaccination Certification
Meeting date: 16 September 2021
John Mason
I still wonder whether you are slightly overstating the case. Lots of the restaurants that I go to throw out all the younger kids at a certain time—9 or 10 o’clock—so such things can be done.
One of Mr Doncaster’s arguments was that people at football matches are mainly outdoors, so certification should not be needed. Do you accept that we are now going to have such a system? I presume that most people have to use public transport to get to football stadiums, and there is a fair bit of space inside stadiums where people eat, go to the toilet and so on.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2022-23: Public Finances and the Impact of Covid-19
Meeting date: 14 September 2021
John Mason
Might that suggest that we should try to get a different relationship, so that we do not compete so much with those areas?
