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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Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Criminal courts backlog”
Meeting date: 14 September 2023
Richard Leonard
Can I go back to a fairly fundamental question? Do you accept the findings of the Auditor General’s report?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Criminal courts backlog”
Meeting date: 14 September 2023
Richard Leonard
Yes, of course, Mr McQueen.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Criminal courts backlog”
Meeting date: 14 September 2023
Richard Leonard
Mr Rennick, you will have heard the Auditor General’s evidence to the committee on the report that we are discussing this morning. He said that Victim Support Scotland and Rape Crisis Scotland
“were not used to the extent that we might have expected”.—[Official Report, Public Audit Committee, 8 June 2023; c 9-10.]
Have you reflected on that over the summer and are you redoubling your efforts to address that shortfall?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Criminal courts backlog”
Meeting date: 14 September 2023
Richard Leonard
Finally, let me turn to another related aspect. The report is quite critical of your approach to considering the equality impact of decisions that you have made and of the transformational change programmes that you have.
At paragraph 79, the Auditor General rightly points out the “unequal impact” of the court backlog. For example, he points to three categories of people. One is young children who are going through a formative experience in life. If they are witnesses or, indeed, victims, those delays will have a disproportionate and potentially devastating impact on them. The Auditor General’s conclusions were that he did not see enough evidence that those issues were being sufficiently taken into account.
Secondly, women disproportionately are caught up in the court backlog system, again as witnesses and, unfortunately, often as victims in the system. What account has been taken of that in addressing where the resources need to go and where the priorities are?
Thirdly, the Auditor General points out—this goes back to earlier questions that we had this morning—the situation that we have with people on remand in our prisons. You described how we have both the highest prison population and the highest proportion of those in the prison population who are on remand of almost anywhere but, even within that, there are great inequalities. The Auditor General points out that 25 per cent of males in prison are on remand, 30 per cent of women in Scottish prisons are on remand and 48 per cent of young people in Scotland’s prisons are on remand.
Why have you not sufficiently built equality impact assessments into decisions on the work that you have been doing, that you are doing and that you will do in the future?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Criminal courts backlog”
Meeting date: 14 September 2023
Richard Leonard
Just so that we are clear, at the end of paragraph 81, the Auditor General concludes:
“we found very limited evidence that equality impact assessments were developed in a timely manner for most of the RRT workstreams and initiatives, with only two equality impact assessments prepared.”
That is a very poor result, is it not?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Criminal courts backlog”
Meeting date: 14 September 2023
Richard Leonard
Is it not the case that equality impact assessments and equality considerations, rather than being some bolt-on at the end to check how you did, should have been built into the foundation of the work that you were doing?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Criminal courts backlog”
Meeting date: 14 September 2023
Richard Leonard
Okay. On that note of agreement, I draw this morning’s evidence session to a close. I thank Mr Rennick, Ms Dalrymple and Mr McQueen for their time. We have quite a lot to consider in the evidence that we have taken. We will certainly consider what our next steps are. Thank you very much once again for being here with us this morning. I will now move the committee out of public session and into private session.
10:30 Meeting continued in private until 11:26.Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Criminal courts backlog”
Meeting date: 14 September 2023
Richard Leonard
Okay. I take you back to my original question. To what extent is that currently fully costed?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Criminal courts backlog”
Meeting date: 14 September 2023
Richard Leonard
Agenda item 2 is consideration of the Auditor General for Scotland’s report on the criminal courts backlog. I am pleased to welcome three witnesses. From the Scottish Government, we have the director general for education and justice, Neil Rennick, and the interim director of justice, Catriona Dalrymple. We are also joined by Eric McQueen, who is the chief executive of the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service. We have a number of questions, but, before we get to them, I invite Mr Rennick and then Mr McQueen to make some opening remarks.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Criminal courts backlog”
Meeting date: 14 September 2023
Richard Leonard
Thank you. I will bring in the rest of the committee shortly, but I will begin by asking about something that Mr Rennick alluded to in his opening comments, which was that the backlog in our criminal courts has had a really significant effect on victims and witnesses who are waiting for justice to be served. What additional support has been given, either directly by the Scottish Government or the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service or through other relevant support and advocacy organisations, to allay some of the impacts that the delays have had on victims and witnesses?
