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 1370 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 22 November 2022
Ross Greer (West Scotland) (Green)
Minister, I am interested to have a bit of clarity on which of the budget revisions are presumed to be one-offs due to underspends or unforeseen circumstances and which have arisen, as in the NZET portfolio, because of lower than expected demand. Which areas of lower demand are expected to reoccur such that the new figure after the budget revision will be baselined into next year’s budget instead of a return to the baseline figure that was in the budget at the start of this year?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 22 November 2022
Ross Greer
I recognise that the NZET reductions are not in your portfolio so you might not be able to go into the specifics. However, given that they are some of the more substantial reductions, what effect does the Government expect them to have on hitting our NZET targets for emission reductions, nature restoration and so on and, separately, our child poverty targets as they relate to home energy efficiency?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 22 November 2022
Ross Greer
I have a question that relates to the point about whether the savings will recur—that is, whether the baseline now includes them, rather than being the figure that we started the financial year with. Where the savings are being made in order to deliver what is required for public sector pay, we can presume that public sector pay increases are a recurring cost and not a one-off for this year. We will therefore need to find that money from somewhere in future years, although it will not necessarily need to come from the specific areas that it came from this year.
What instructions have been issued to ministers and civil service directors about evaluating the impact of those savings and whether it will be sensible to baseline the new figure in from next year because the potential negative consequences are manageable in some way?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 November 2022
Ross Greer (West Scotland) (Green)
My first question is primarily for Tony Buchanan, but I would be interested in hearing the other panellists’ thoughts on it. Do you feel from the bill and its financial memorandum that the costs of the potential transfer of children’s services have been made clear?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 November 2022
Ross Greer
Just for clarity, do you believe that further costings should come before Parliament completes this particular legislative process, or could they come through the independent review?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 November 2022
Ross Greer
Yes, that is totally fine.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 November 2022
Ross Greer
The level of integration between children’s services and other services has been mentioned quite a bit already, particularly in answer to Willie Rennie’s line of questioning and, in the COSLA submission, particularly in relation to early years childcare provision. If the decision is made to transfer children’s services to the new national care service, how easy will it be to disaggregate that discrete spending from the wider spending that local authorities put into services that are for children in some way, rather than the specific children’s social services that we are talking about?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 November 2022
Ross Greer
You have already mentioned that this is a framework bill, and that the decision whether to transfer children’s services will be taken not as part of this legislative process but later on. Is there any information that has not been provided but which you think is critical before Parliament further considers the bill, or can we wait for the future decision specifically on children’s services?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Financial Memorandum
Meeting date: 8 November 2022
Ross Greer (West Scotland) (Green)
My first question is on sequencing. I entirely understand the point that you made in your opening remarks about what Parliament’s standing orders require you to lay out in a financial memorandum, and I appreciate your comment about not pre-empting the result of co-design processes. However, for me, that raises the obvious—if perhaps daft laddie—question of why we did not go through the co-design process before we reached this stage of the parliamentary process.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Financial Memorandum
Meeting date: 8 November 2022
Ross Greer
I appreciate that, as you have said and as we would all expect, you are engaged in discussions with the UK Government on achieving VAT neutrality, but surely, until those discussions reach what we hope is a positive conclusion, the default position is that there will be VAT liability. If that is the status quo at present, until an agreement is reached, I am not sure why it has not been covered in the financial memorandum.
