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.
Filter your results Hide all filters
Displaying 1174 contributions
|
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Paul Sweeney
I appreciate that, Sir Jonathan. Dr Tucker, do you have a view on the ratcheting effect, which can move only in one direction if the use of secondary powers for enhancements is not available?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Paul Sweeney
It seems as though the power of determining that is entirely with the executive, and therein lies the risk of democratic overreach.
I emphasise that the UK Government’s position is—this is stated in the note from the Cabinet Office—that
“the power is required as there are approximately 2000 pieces of secondary retained EU law, including RDEUL, that the Government may wish to replace with legislation more suited to the UK’s needs. Doing so purely through sector specific primary legislation would take a significant amount of Parliamentary time.”
Its justification is that there is not enough capacity in the Parliament to handle that process. I assume, and you might agree, that that is an overly generalised position and that there probably is more capacity and a bit more nuance to it all. Do you agree, Sir Jonathan?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Paul Sweeney
Before he does, I will add a supplementary question. If ministers were to choose not to bring forward replacement legislation, would there be any opportunity at all for Parliament to scrutinise their decision? Please also feel free to make a general comment in relation to the discussion so far.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Paul Sweeney
Morag Ross, do you have any points to add?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Paul Sweeney
That is quite an alarming realisation—that there could potentially be wholesale destruction of legislation in that way.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Paul Sweeney
On the issue of the general powers, the Cabinet Office’s response says:
“The Retained EU Law Substance review has indicated a distinct lack of subordinate legislation making powers to remove REUL from the UK statute book where appropriate, and if required replace that provision with legislation that is more fit for purpose for the UK.”
It gives a reason for that:
“Had the UK never been a member of the EU, many of the areas identified by the substance review would likely already have similar powers to comparable non EU policy areas to amend. The lack of powers is therefore an oddity created by our EU membership”.
That seems to be saying that the extraordinary situation is that the retained EU law does not provide the same provisions in secondary legislation. Would you agree with that assessment, Sir Jonathan, or perhaps Dr Tucker?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Paul Sweeney
Thank you. I want to probe further on the scenario in which the Government did not introduce replacement legislation. As far as I can see, the Parliament would have no capacity whatever to influence that, and it would not be able to perform any form of scrutiny on the revocation of legislation. There might be a difference if the Government were to introduce replacement legislation, which would perhaps provide a mechanism, but if it were simply to revoke laws through secondary measures, there are no means whatever to scrutinise the impacts.
Do you have a view on that, Sir Jonathan?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Paul Sweeney
Yes.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Paul Sweeney
Thank you for that, Dr Tucker.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 7 December 2022
Paul Sweeney
Another key point about support from our pharmacy network more generally was about ensuring that people who are released from custody or those who are caring for them if they have a support network are provided with naloxone. The evidence that has been provided has indicated that that is a patchy practice. What is the minister doing to ensure that it is more of a standard protocol?
10:30