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 成人快手 and committees will automatically update to show only the 成人快手 and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of 成人快手 and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of 成人快手 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 1467 contributions
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Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
What is the month during the year when the inflation rate for the private prison contracts is set?
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
Essentially, the private sector contracts were inflation proofed at the time of the agreement of the contracts. What is the risk transfer involved in that, whereby the private sector is protected from the rampant inflation that the public sector faces?
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
That is helpful. Thank you.
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
So is this the moment for the Government to be bold in the challenge that it puts in front of a range of organisations鈥攁ll of whom have been in front of this committee asking for more money鈥攖o say that we must shift our focus, because we cannot go on like this?
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
Finally, if better outcomes are being achieved, is there an argument for money to be allocated to other purposes as a result, instead of its being argued that the money allocated to a particular organisation or policy area can be increased only because it was argued for in the pre-budget process?
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
I will move on to another aspect. I was very struck by the detail that you placed on the record a moment ago regarding your experience in your professional life of the size of the prison population and where it is now. Making a rough calculation of the financial difference in the budgetary costs of accommodating that larger number of prisoners, I estimate that it must come in at something in the order of 拢90 million. It strikes me that that scale of additional financial pressure to be managed by the Scottish budget creates conditions in which the Scottish Government, the judiciary, community justice services and diversionary activity services should be absolutely focused on maximising the opportunities to avoid incarceration if it is safe for that option to be taken. Are all those players engaged in that dialogue? Are they all pointing in the same direction?
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
I take it that those provisions are built into the contract at the point of negotiation.
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
The nuance that I am trying to get across is whether the skills that Police Scotland requires for the policing challenge of today are best served by a discussion about the number of police officers that we have available to us.
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
The long and the short of it is that the Scottish Prison Service, finding itself in a position to deliver capital projects in the aftermath of Covid, is stung by the combination of an intensely competitive marketplace because of the backlog of construction projects; supply chain costs increases, which are fuelled by Brexit and the loss of freedom and movement and the increase in fuel costs, all of which are beyond the control of the Scottish Prison Service; and the challenges of securing an appropriate workforce to deliver such projects. That is the context in which you are trying to rejuvenate your estate.
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
It is very obvious that there is intense financial pressure on the Government and on public services after austerity, Brexit and the spiralling punitive impact of inflation, and I am certainly not underestimating the financial pressures on the Government. In that context, it strikes me that the comments that you have put on the record about the importance of picking up the pace on preventative services are absolutely critical. To all intents and purposes, it looks as though the Government is in a bit of a bind with a rising prison population, because that is a more expensive problem to service than putting in place preventative services, which are much more affordable and, in some circumstances, produce better outcomes.
What impetus is being given across Government to make the shift into preventative services that the cabinet secretary has highlighted? I recognise that this is not just a justice compartment issue, but a wider issue across Government. Is the cabinet focusing its discussions on how a shift might be made in order to reduce the higher-cost custodial service that is being supported, with greater priority being allocated to preventative interventions?
