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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.

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.

Meeting date: 9 March 2022

Mairi Gougeon

I will reiterate some of what I have said throughout the meeting. The committee has heard from a cross-section of stakeholders and has heard a diverse range of views. I have already talked about the complexity of the issue; the evidence that you have heard outlines that.

It is a difficult situation to find a solution to; in this case, it is impossible to find one that would make everyone equally happy. As the cabinet secretary who is responsible for fisheries management and protection, it is my job—as I outlined in response to Jim Fairlie’s question—to take on board and try, no matter how well-intentioned they are, to balance all the competing interests.

Rachael Hamilton talked about some of the comments that I made in response to Jackson Carlaw’s parliamentary question last week. In that response, I said:

“Responsible fisheries management means ensuring that we get the right balance between socioeconomic and environmental outcomes.”—[Official Report, 3 March 2020; c 60.]

In this case, we have done that by increasing protections for spawning cod while also ensuring that fishing can continue to take place in surrounding areas.

The committee has also heard a variety of scientific opinions about what constitutes protection. However, on the advice of Dr Needle, who is the chief fisheries adviser for Scotland, we are applying the precautionary approach and minimising disturbance of the sea bed during the spawning period in the known spawning area. That is the fundamental objective and it is important that we not lose sight of it.

As I said in my opening comments and have said throughout the meeting, the process that led up to the SSI being laid before the committee was by no means ideal, but I firmly stand by the closure decision and believe that we are doing the right thing to contribute to protection of spawning cod.

I have outlined the next steps that Marine Scotland will take. Allan Gibb also talked about monitoring and compliance. We will meet stakeholders after the closure ends this year to hear their thoughts on how it has worked. As we also said, we will look to learn lessons on how the processes can be improved. However, ensuring that the closure was in place from 14 February until the end of April was the right decision and was our number 1 priority.

I hope that Rachael Hamilton will consider not moving her motion and, failing that, that the committee will not support it.