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 łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees will automatically update to show only the łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of łÉČËżěĘÖ 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 1169 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 30 March 2023
Sharon Dowey
The Auditor General reported some progress in producing a performance management framework that tracks progress against the business plan. The commissioner’s office plans to introduce performance indicators to track complaints handling by 2023. Can you give us the latest position regarding the performance management framework and performance indicators?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland 2022”
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
Sharon Dowey
What is your assessment of the progress of the Scottish Government’s Covid costs improvement programme?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland 2022”
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
Sharon Dowey
The report highlights the point that workforce capacity is the biggest risk to recovery and shows that one key recruitment target, that of increasing the general practitioner workforce by 800, is not on track to be achieved by the 2027 deadline. What is the Scottish Government doing to address that? Is the target still achievable?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland 2022”
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
Sharon Dowey
Thanks. Are enough conversations happening among Government departments before they make announcements such as, “There are going to be 800 extra GPs”? Are they then speaking to the universities and giving them the funding? We hear that Scottish universities are limiting the number of Scottish students because they need fee-paying students to pay the costs. Is enough funding being given for those places?
You spoke about primary care workers as well. The Government is trying to put in place more pharmacists to help GPs and reduce the workload. I have, however, heard that, after pharmacists have gone in, GPs have reduced their hours because they are burned out, so that measure is not helping. There is also an issue with workforce planning for pharmacists. Is enough funding being given to the universities to make sure that we can give places to Scottish students?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland 2022”
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
Sharon Dowey
Good morning. The report highlights significant challenges facing the NHS in Scotland, while noting that healthcare systems are under extreme pressure across the world. How is the NHS in Scotland performing compared with other countries’ healthcare systems?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland 2022”
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
Sharon Dowey
The report also states that Covid-19 spend will no longer be monitored. Given your call for transparency, recovery and progress, is it premature for the Scottish Government to stop monitoring that spending?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland 2022”
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
Sharon Dowey
Will all health boards follow the same guidelines? If we are not monitoring spending, do we run the risk of some health boards spending a lot more on Covid than others, or, indeed, some not spending enough on measures?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 2 March 2023
Sharon Dowey
The section 22 report says, at paragraph 17, that directions were issued by the Standards Commission for Scotland. Do you have any information about how long they are likely to remain in place?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 2 March 2023
Sharon Dowey
The delay in confirming the funding would have had an impact on actioning the recommendations in the report.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 2 March 2023
Sharon Dowey
You mentioned the workforce planning exercise in your reply about the workforce to Colin Beattie. That revealed that the commissioner’s office would not be able to meet the statutory functions or to address the recommendations that were made in your 2022-21 audit report. Emergency proposals for additional funding were submitted to the SPCB in May 2022 and funding was granted in October 2022, which is quite a long time for something that is described as an emergency proposal. Do you have a view on that?
