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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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
One of the things that you mentioned in your submission was churn. You said:
“Churn among civil servants is an issue across the civil service in both Whitehall and across the devolved administrations, which is encouraged for the development of generalist civil servants ... Researchers have also commented adversely about churn among politicians”.
I had a wee look. Apparently, in the year to September 2022, the UK Government had five education secretaries and, from 2000 to 2022, it had 22 housing ministers. Here at Holyrood, we have had four transport ministers in two years. How much does the churn in ministers, as well as in civil servants, militate against good decision making?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Dr Foster, does the workload of ministers mean that they cannot keep their eye constantly on the ball? Does that have an impact on the quality of decisions, and does it mean that some of the decisions are, in effect, outsourced because they have to rely on other people to have a full grasp of the detail?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Indecisiveness is obviously a concern in some instances.
I will wind up the session by giving our witnesses the opportunity to make any final points if they feel that we have not touched on an issue or if they wish to emphasise something.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Before you come in, I note that you touched on workload earlier. Obviously, ministers can have a dozen meetings a day. They have to respond to questions in the chamber, formulate policy and speak in debates. They are often pressed to deliver—or indeed are proactive in delivering—statements. They might have a constituency, and they probably have a home and family life. How do they manage to balance effective decision making with those pressures?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Finally, there is the 24-hour news cycle and pressure from ministers to make announcements. They want to be seen to be successful by their own political party as well as the wider public; given that they have the life expectancy of a Hibs or Chelsea manager, you can understand why they want to make an impact right away.
If we are thinking about how we achieve significant long-term outcomes, it all comes back to the same issue of churn and stability in the relationship between the civil service and ministers. Ministers often come up with wonderful ideas that might not be wonderful when it comes to implementation, and they might well long since have moved on by the time that the ideas are actually implemented.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
That phrase “monopoly of wisdom” is interesting. We have talked about generalism versus specialism in the civil service but, of course, ministers are almost all generalists. Some of them are appointed to portfolios that they have no understanding of and in which they had no real interest before they were appointed. Indeed, they might rather have been offered a completely different portfolio. That means that they are even more reliant on special advisers and their civil servants.
Given that that situation is unlikely to change and that all Governments will continue to promote generalists, how can we enhance decision making in that context?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
That is interesting. They often share the fate of their ministers, so, if the minister does well, they will do well and, if the minister does not do well, they will not do particularly well, although they are not always tied to the minister in that way. They try to help ministers to formulate and deliver policy, so I can understand your view, but the role benefits the governing party and it is politicised, so I wonder whether special advisers have an impact on the access of civil servants to ministers. Are they a kind of Martin Bormann-type character who stands at the door and prevents others, even senior civil servants, from getting to the minister when they might need to?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
That is an important point. The Scottish Government has done better than the UK Government when there has been consistency in policy, with the private sector knowing that a policy is, in as much as it can be in politics, on tablets of stone so that long-term investment decisions can be made. However, the Scottish Government has not done as well as Westminster when there has been turmoil and changes of direction in policy.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Because the discussion is so fascinating, I am in danger of being drawn into it to the exclusion of my colleagues, so I will just touch on one more thing before I move on and let colleagues in.
Paul, in Scottish Engineering’s written submission, when asked about what effective decision making by the Scottish Government looks like and how we can learn from what has worked well and what has worked not so well, you said that what has worked well is the aerospace response group,
“as a response to the significant pandemic impact on Scotland’s aerospace sector”,
and that what has not worked well is the
“Reaction to the current skills crisis”.
Will you touch on why the aerospace response group worked well and why the reaction to the current skills crisis has not?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Yes, you say in your submission that open-mindedness is one of the behaviours or criteria that are necessary in relation to decision making. Auchrannie in my constituency is owned by its employees and it has 170 workers, so it is not always small companies that are owned by their employees. People sometimes think that employee ownership is very small scale, but it can be much larger and can even encompass sectors that people do not automatically think of.
