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 1653 contributions
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Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 May 2025
Martin Whitfield
And that individual would stand by it.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 May 2025
Martin Whitfield
That would be sufficient. That is fine. Does Robert or Malcolm have any comments on that?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 May 2025
Martin Whitfield
Excellent.
My other question is on whether it would be useful to have clarification in the bill of the opening times for signing a petition—for example, a statement that people can sign a petition between 9 am and 7.30 pm. Again, it might be useful to give support to those who are administering the petition and to provide clarity and understanding that can be pointed to. Would that be helpful or, again, should that be a decision for the petition officer? Perhaps Peter Stanyon can start.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 May 2025
Martin Whitfield
If we put aside the point on policy, which I accept will be indicated by the Scottish Parliament in one way or another, would providing for the petition to be signed in the area in which you are registered to vote—in essence, linking it to your constituency or local authority area—make the administration of it far more straightforward?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 May 2025
Martin Whitfield
I will probe that with you. We are talking about what I hope are hypotheticals. If a young person turns 16 when council elections are looming, they may trot along and vote in that election. Then, potentially, they might be told, “By the way, you can’t take part in this other election because you turned 16 two days too late for registration.” The registration teams face such problems all the time. Is it simply an administrative process, or is there something that should concern us, such as that that might cause a feeling of disenfranchisement?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 May 2025
Martin Whitfield
That is helpful.
My final question is for Peter, and it is about the interaction between parties and petitions. Political parties, for various reasons, will throw the kitchen sink at some recall petitions. Do you have any administrative concerns about the relationship between the work that parties do to seek a particular outcome and that of parties that are seeking an alternative outcome? Is there anything that we should consider from the experiences with previous petitions? How does that experience feed into the relationship between the parties and the petitions officer?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 May 2025
Martin Whitfield
Is there a challenge in introducing the petition and in the subsequent regional poll such that the number of electoral methods that are being used in Scotland gets to a point at which fewer people than are sitting in this room understand them all? You have set out the need for strong communication based on a system that is as simple to understand as possible. From an administrative point of view—I recognise the evidence that you have given about the cost, but let us put that to one side—is it a step too far to bring yet another electoral system into Scotland?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 May 2025
Martin Whitfield
I appreciate that.
Let me just push at this issue. The four-week period makes sense, and I think that the reality is that, in all but one of the examples of the UK-wide petition examples that we can look at, the threshold was reached very early on. Should a petition close at that stage? Is there any value in its running on?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 May 2025
Martin Whitfield
The votes of the 60 per cent of people who go the other way.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 May 2025
Martin Whitfield
My follow-up question is on the fact that we have heard the petition described as an electoral event rather than an election. Should we give strong credence to the risk that, if you turn up at a venue, others will be able to identify the view that you will express?
