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 1955 contributions
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Criminal Justice Committee
Risk Assessment in the Justice System
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Jamie Greene
Would such people be released anyway due to the policy on release, even if they have been wrongly assessed? That is the crux of my question.
Criminal Justice Committee
Risk Assessment in the Justice System
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Jamie Greene
I am keen to let others in, convener. If anything jumps out at me, I will jump in again.
Criminal Justice Committee
Risk Assessment in the Justice System
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Jamie Greene
Sorry—I appreciate that there is a technical answer to a simple question, but the problem is that I have not heard the answer yet. I want this to be absolutely clear. There are 1,317 cases, of which 1,032 are closed and the rest are open. Is there the potential for other cases to be affected by the IT glitch?
My second question is linked to the first. If the issue goes back prior to the IT centralisation project—the cabinet secretary said in his statement that that might have brought the issue to light in the first place—surely that means that, for a number of years, the system was getting it wrong. What work is being done to identify how many other cases there might be in which risk was incorrectly identified? What do you think the scale of that might be? Are we talking about tens, hundreds or thousands of cases? How many prisoners have been released in the past 10 years? I suspect that that is a substantial number. Does the Government know how many people might have been wrongly risk assessed prior to release? I do not want to know just about current cases but about those going back 10 years.
13:00Criminal Justice Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Jamie Greene
I will maybe continue with Mr Purdie, as he has all the figures. My apologies to the cabinet secretary for not jotting down the figure earlier but I am glad to get an updated number.
How does that figure compare to the number of cases in wider society? Can you contain cases more easily in a prison environment or is it more difficult, due to the nature of the estate?
What effect has any relaxation of some of the restrictions that were needed during the temporary Covid measures—such as those around visitation or people being out on licence or temporary release—had on the relativity of the case rate versus the population? Are we seeing a marked proportionate increase in the positivity rate as a result of the relaxation of some of those restrictions?
12:30Criminal Justice Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Jamie Greene
Thank you, convener. I would be happy to come back in later with other questions.
Cabinet secretary, you mentioned that you had read or listened to a number of our evidence sessions. As other members have alluded to, there is a difference of opinion on the success or otherwise of virtual trials. I want to clarify the difference between the Government’s proposals on the on-going ability for people to give evidence virtually—which I think has been found to be helpful and beneficial for witnesses and specialists, as well as for the most vulnerable in specific cases—and trials being done completely virtually. We have heard that very few such trials have been done, so we do not really know what effect they have.
I will pose the same question that I posed to the previous panel. Would it not be more prudent to conduct a much wider pilot of virtual trials before we embed in legislation any permanency to such trials?
Criminal Justice Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Jamie Greene
We understand the concept of increasing time limits so that cases do not time out. That is entirely appropriate and it would be difficult to argue against it. However, increasing time limits has a substantial impact on both parties—victims and accused, and, in particular, accused who are held on remand.
Other than not allowing cases to time out, what possible justification is there for extending case time limits? Is that the only suitable reason?
Criminal Justice Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Jamie Greene
On a technical level, therefore, the provisions are an extension of temporary powers. Is that extension time limited or permanent?
Criminal Justice Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Jamie Greene
Why do you need to have the power in future?
Criminal Justice Committee
Risk Assessment in the Justice System
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Jamie Greene
I thank the Government for its briefing, albeit it was not easy trying to digest 18 pages overnight, given the technicalities of the problem.
I want to get my head around the bigger picture. During last week’s statement, we did not have a lot of time to go into detail, due to pressures on chamber time. This is a great setting in which to do that. Is 1,317 the maximum number of cases that have had a wrong risk assessment as a result of information technology glitches, or could there be more cases and you need to do further work to find that out and how far back the problem goes?
Criminal Justice Committee
Risk Assessment in the Justice System
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Jamie Greene
The language that is being used is around live or known public protection issues, but is the cabinet secretary confident that no one has been released earlier than they should have been? If anyone has been released earlier than they would have been under normal circumstances—were it not for the IT glitch—did any of those people, at any point in the past, pose a public protection issue? Outwith normal reoffending rates, which we talked about earlier, did any of those people go on to reoffend or end up back in the system? I guess that we are looking for a little bit more comfort that those who were released inadvertently did not go on to reoffend.
