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 1631 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 21 March 2024
Jamie Greene
He was not under investigation, but he was clearly under a lot of pressure to respond to a very serious allegation by Audit Scotland about corporate governance. While that process was going on, and you were, I presume, waiting on a response, he handed in his notice. He was required to give you six months’ notice so, rather than have him hanging around for six months, was he allowed to leave with immediate effect and a six-month pay-off?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “NHS in Scotland 2023”
Meeting date: 21 March 2024
Jamie Greene
This is a wide-ranging report, but I appreciate that we are short of time, so I will focus on specific areas, particularly the operational performance of the NHS, which affects the public more than some of the other issues.
The first obvious area to cover is where we are on waiting time targets. In that respect, the report makes grim reading. Albeit that the exhibit goes up only to September 2023, it seems to me that none of the eight key metrics on performance against waiting times is being met, and that some are failing by quite some margin—in particular, accident and emergency treatment times, the standard that cancer treatment should start within 62 days, and the 12-week in-patient and out-patient targets. What is your general view on whether things are getting slightly better or whether the long-term trend, certainly from 2018 to now, has been a trajectory of increased waiting times?
Public Audit Committee
National Strategy for Economic Transformation
Meeting date: 14 March 2024
Jamie Greene
My next question is on that—do not worry.
Public Audit Committee
National Strategy for Economic Transformation
Meeting date: 14 March 2024
Jamie Greene
That sounds good. Thank you.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of the Scottish Prison Service”
Meeting date: 14 March 2024
Jamie Greene
That is interesting. Other pieces of legislation going through other committees are looking at the remand issue. Certainly, in any interactions that I have had with the judiciary, there is very much a feeling that remand is used as a last resort, with the presumption against releasing people when they are charged and go back to court.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of the Scottish Prison Service”
Meeting date: 14 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Would you recommend that if that were the case?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of the Scottish Prison Service”
Meeting date: 14 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Indeed. I am sure that we could have a whole session on whether public services are fit for purpose once people are released, and another one on rehabilitation and what we are doing right or not doing right in Scotland.
My final point is a grave one: deaths in custody. Across prisons and other forms of custody, it is estimated that there are around four deaths per week. Those are not solely in prisons, of course, but a worryingly large number of people are dying in the different levels of the prison estate. Is that part of your watching brief? Do you have any views on that, or have you performed any analysis of why those numbers are so high? Have you made any recommendations to the Prison Service or to ministers on how that number can be reduced?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of the Scottish Prison Service”
Meeting date: 14 March 2024
Jamie Greene
No, I commend you for the work that you have done. However, clearly, all that work will be made more difficult with an increasing population, an antiquated estate and the lack of resource and assistance.
Public Audit Committee
National Strategy for Economic Transformation
Meeting date: 14 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Good morning. I will start with the basics. From your briefing, it seems that Scotland has two issues: sluggish growth in gross domestic product, and low productivity. Is that assertion correct?
Public Audit Committee
National Strategy for Economic Transformation
Meeting date: 14 March 2024
Jamie Greene
That reflects the complexity of our respective roles in this area: on the one hand, using public money and Government intervention in certain areas in which the Government chooses to do so; and, on the other, using that as leverage to improve the wider economic outlook in the private sector, in which small and medium-sized businesses, for example, are part of the solution.
I want to touch on the very short mention that is made, on page 14 of your briefing, of the new deal for business that the Scottish Government has touted. Would you say that it is facing a bit of an uphill struggle with that? Last year, independent analysis by commentators such as the Fraser of Allander Institute predicted a less than favourable outlook for that relationship. By August of last year, the Fraser of Allander Institute was saying that only 9 per cent of Scottish businesses believed that the Government understood the business environment that they worked in. In certain sectors, such as hospitality, construction and professional services, there was a huge differential. Between 50 and 90 per cent of businesses there believed that the Scottish Government did not understand their environment.
That is the backdrop that the Government is up against, and that is the uphill struggle that it faces. It is very early to tell, but is there any evidence that the new deal for business is working or has been reset?
