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 2963 contributions
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Economy and Fair Work Committee
Scotland’s Supply Chain
Meeting date: 10 November 2021
John Mason
Mark Logan, the digital side is seen as being for young people. Are there enough older people in that area? Should older people be getting more training in it?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Scotland’s Supply Chain
Meeting date: 10 November 2021
John Mason
That was helpful.
Perhaps I can stick with you for just a minute. On the point about the state perhaps supporting more training for younger people but less for older workers, I have a small firm in my constituency that takes two apprentices every year. It deliberately takes one younger and one older apprentice, because it sees the advantage in having both, but it gets more support for the younger apprentice.
Going back to the issue of post-employment skills development, I believe that you said that it was terrible and that we should remove disincentives in that respect. What did you mean by that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform and Christie Commission
Meeting date: 9 November 2021
John Mason
The discussion has been very interesting and has covered a lot of ground; I realise that I am the last questioner.
Coming from an accounting background, I want to pin down some numbers, especially with Professor Mitchell. You said that we should be bolder, so I was going to ask whether we should, for example, take 10 per cent off the hospital budget and put it into primary care. However, you then said that we can do things only incrementally. Would it be useful to have some fixed concept over the next few years, whereby we give, say, 1 per cent less than we might have to secondary hospital care and 1 per cent—or the equivalent figure—more to primary care? That might give us something solid that we as a committee could agree on and then put to Parliament. After all, as everyone has pointed out, we have not made the progress that we might have done.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform and Christie Commission
Meeting date: 9 November 2021
John Mason
On that point, before I come to Mr Boyle, you are arguing that, just as there has been a need for extra tax for care services, we could put in place—we would have to choose whether we wanted to do so—a tax for extra preventative spending. That could be done to launch it all, in a sense. We all seem to have said that we cannot cut anything, so we will wait until we have extra money, and once we have that, we will put it into preventative care, and that is never going to happen.
12:45Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform and Christie Commission
Meeting date: 9 November 2021
John Mason
Mr Boyle, you can comment on that, too. I was interested that you said that it would be better to measure how safe people are rather than how many police we have. As an auditor, do you think that that would be practical? I did a tiny bit of auditing earlier in my life and I know that measuring the number of police is easier than measuring people’s safety. If we were safer but had fewer police, what would Liz Smith, the Daily Record and everybody else complain about? [Laughter.]
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform and Christie Commission
Meeting date: 9 November 2021
John Mason
Before I bring in the other witnesses, that leads me on to another thought. The point has been made that one of the Christie principles was about more joint working, collaboration and so on. Out of that came the health and social care partnerships or integration joint boards, whatever they are currently called, but from my perspective, those are just another kind of new body. Professor Mitchell talked about ensuring that we do not simply add more institutions, but now, instead of a situation in which I either write to the chief executive of the health board or the chief executive of the council, I have a third option, as I can also write to the chief executive of the integration joint board.
My question for you all is whether that kind of thing—not necessarily IJBs specifically, but more generally—has been a mistake or has not worked in the way that it was meant to. If so, why is that the case?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform and Christie Commission
Meeting date: 9 November 2021
John Mason
For my last point, I will return to Professor Mitchell. You said that, during Covid, we have seen action. In Glasgow, we got cycle lanes quickly, although there was no consultation with the community. To my mind, that immediately suggests that there has been a trade-off. Consultation will take place on whether the cycle lanes are to be permanent, but it did not happen before they were put in. We also got off the street most people who were sleeping on the street, but that meant that people who were overcrowded in their housing could not get another house. I presume that the answer to that is to provide more housing. Will such trade-offs always exist?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform and Christie Commission
Meeting date: 9 November 2021
John Mason
That is possible.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 November 2021
John Mason
Minister, you told the convener that some funding would be allocated in the spring budget revision. Can you explain why that cannot be done now?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 November 2021
John Mason
You also said that there was a Barnett guarantee last year. We knew the minimum that we were going to get. What is the worst case scenario? Is it that all of the extra UK funding would be just a reallocation of existing funding and we would not get any consequentials?
