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 ˿ and committees will automatically update to show only the ˿ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of ˿ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of ˿ 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 1174 contributions
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Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Complex Mesh Surgical Service
Meeting date: 2 May 2023
Paul Sweeney
I think that Mr O’Kelly wants to make a point.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Scrutiny of NHS Boards (NHS Dumfries and Galloway, NHS Tayside and NHS Lanarkshire)
Meeting date: 2 May 2023
Paul Sweeney
Item 3 is engagement with national health service boards. The committee will take evidence from Jeff Ace, the chief executive of NHS Dumfries and Galloway; Professor Grant Archibald, the chief executive of NHS Tayside; and Professor Jann Gardner, the chief executive of NHS Lanarkshire. I welcome you all and thank you for joining us.
The first area that we will look at is financial sustainability. There are significant budgetary pressures across the public sector, and we want to establish the position on key aspects. I will kick off. Audit Scotland’s report “NHS in Scotland 2022” noted that only three of 14 health boards are predicting that they will break even in the 2022-23 financial year and that extensive waiting lists and increases in emergency care are among the pressures. Will the witnesses provide detail on the efforts that their boards are making on early intervention to prevent the need for emergency care and acute care down the line? I start with Professor Gardner of NHS Lanarkshire.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Scrutiny of NHS Boards (NHS Dumfries and Galloway, NHS Tayside and NHS Lanarkshire)
Meeting date: 2 May 2023
Paul Sweeney
Certainly.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Paul Sweeney
It is just a thought that I had.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Paul Sweeney
That was an interesting insight, and I want to follow up on one point. What active measures do you take to monitor engagement? Have you seen any trends developing over time? Perhaps you can contrast print media with broadcasting. It is an interesting idea that if you were to front load coverage through the public service broadcasting model, it would then cascade into the commercial side and print media in particular.
09:00Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Paul Sweeney
That is interesting. Have STV and ITV had similar experiences?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Paul Sweeney
So there might be people who would love to spend their days writing about their sport as well as participating in it, but they might not have the opportunity. We could consider whether there were any ways of joining those things up.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Paul Sweeney
In broadcasting, have you seen an evolution in engagement and coverage that might, in the longer term, present an opportunity for the print media?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Paul Sweeney
We would all lament the decline in financial capacity in the print media over the past few decades, but there is still that tension that you have described. You need something that can get pulled on by the reader, but the question, then, is how you put it in front of people. It is a kind of chicken-and-egg scenario. Curling, for example, was a huge thing back in 2002 at the time of the Salt Lake City Olympic games, and Scotland went crazy for it for about six months. Clearly, when these things are put in front of people, they get interested in them, but how do you then seed that demand?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Paul Sweeney
I was taken by the earlier comments about the idea of building some sort of ecosystem that could support young women coming into journalism. Mr Gulhane mentioned that we spoke to women who might be elite athletes but who cannot sustain themselves in their sport because it does not yet have sufficient financial heft for people to earn a full-time living out of it. Such people are fans of the sport and participate in it and will probably have great creative and innovative ideas about how to promote it. Given what you said about the local democracy initiative, could that be a model that we could use to support women who are athletes in an emerging sport and who have the potential to promote that sport through journalism as well? There is an opportunity for the country to look at building something new, not just in terms of broadcasting, which does interesting work to bring forward pundits and commentators who have insights from the sport, but on the print side, where that might not happen so much. Could we look at building something like that?
