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 1673 contributions
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Criminal Justice Committee
Priorities in the Justice Sector and an Action Plan
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Russell Findlay
No, on the review relating to victims and witnesses. I do not know whether that is a problem or not. It is fine that the police have responded and appear to have told us what they are doing in relation to stalking, but the issue goes much deeper than that. It is about the courts, the lack of communication, the Crown Office and decisions that are made but not communicated. There is no response on that. That would not reassure a victim.
Criminal Justice Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Russell Findlay
To continue on the media stuff, I do not know if there is any detail on this, but I have been told that something like 20 to 30 per cent of those who could apply—which is about 1,700, I believe—were expected to apply, but it turns out that 80 per cent of them have applied. That has serious potential implications.
Criminal Justice Committee
Priorities in the Justice Sector and an Action Plan
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Russell Findlay
With regard to legal aid, the committee had asked the Scottish Government to look at the role of the Public Defence Solicitors Office and whether that could be expanded to address the long-running dispute involving criminal defence solicitors doing legal aid work.
On page 11 of his submission, Keith Brown recognises the value of the PDSO. However, it is only when we turn to paper 2 that we see that, in response to our request, the Government
“indicated it was grateful for the role played ... but there was no commitment to a review”.
That just seems a little bit short sighted, perhaps; no explanation is really given as to why. Saying no is fine but it would be nice to know why.
Criminal Justice Committee
Priorities in the Justice Sector and an Action Plan
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Russell Findlay
I have past experience of trying to obtain court transcripts. It is not easy; indeed, it can be almost impossible. I am not surprised by the survivor’s experience. I wonder whether the process is designed not to be easy. I do not see any good reason why transcripts should not be freely available.
Criminal Justice Committee
Priorities in the Justice Sector and an Action Plan
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Russell Findlay
On page 20, the table says that the Parole Board for Scotland did not respond to our recommendation. Recent data suggests that people who had applied to attend parole hearings had all, I think, been turned down. It would be nice to know what is going on.
Criminal Justice Committee
Priorities in the Justice Sector and an Action Plan
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Russell Findlay
There is reference to a revised serious organised crime strategy. “The Vision for Justice in Scotland” says that the strategy is to be finalised by spring 2022. Is there any way of getting an update as to when that might be published and whether it will be a public document? That would be helpful to know.
11:15Criminal Justice Committee
Priorities in the Justice Sector and an Action Plan
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Russell Findlay
I notice a running theme: a tendency for the Government to amalgamate numbers for a bunch of years and present them without enabling us to break them down year by year, to see whether there is any pattern or direction of travel. It might be useful to get a table with the amounts recovered by year.
Criminal Justice Committee
Priorities in the Justice Sector and an Action Plan
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Russell Findlay
We cannot assume that omission is disagreement, so I think that it is important that we go back and ask again.
Criminal Justice Committee
Priorities in the Justice Sector and an Action Plan
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Russell Findlay
I am a bit confused about what the table says about civil recovery. Forgive me if I have not seen the information that it says has been provided—perhaps the clerks can point me to that after the meeting. We know little about how much is recovered or whether it is possible to measure if that amount is sufficient.
Criminal Justice Committee
Priorities in the Justice Sector and an Action Plan
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Russell Findlay
We have already stated that we have not had responses to a lot of stuff, but there are so many unanswered questions as to where safe consumption rooms might be, including whether they would be mobile or in communities, and about tolerance zones around them. That seems to be a big omission.
