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: 14 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Yes—I, too, am restraining myself from coming in on the back of that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
It looks like a Cy Twombly drawing—if it was, it would be worth around $70 million.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
I wonder how that would work here, in reality. It depends on who is doing the scoring.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
I mentioned the BBC to colleagues before the public session started. It is quite easy for reputations to disappear or be damaged almost overnight, to a degree.
I am jumping about a bit here, because the report is so interesting—I could spend the whole time asking loads of questions, but colleagues will want to come in, and they always get narky if I take too long at the start—I think that John Mason may agree.
You say in the report that the new public management approach did not succeed even according to the objectives that it set for itself, which is an interesting point.
I will highlight one of the issues. We can have all the great theories that we like and all the structures that we want to implement, but the important thing is to have capacity. You ask,
“Does the Scottish Government have sufficient policy capacity?”,
and you look at generalist civil servants versus specialisms. You talk about leadership training and how much capacity exists even outside the civil service for Government to tap into. You also mention
“the risk of ineffective government when policy capacity and training does not live up to the Scottish Government’s ... expectations”
and the expectations of the people whom it represents. Where are we at with capacity, and what could we do to improve and enhance it?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Ferries are boats that carry people.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
To wind up the session, I have three further questions to ask.
One of the things that I really like about your report is the wee take-home messages, which I think are quite helpful. In one of those, on page 16, you said:
“new ideas are applied patchily to established practices.”
How could that be improved?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
To follow up on that, you refer on more than one occasion to the need to trust public service professionals, which is obviously fundamental.
On the other side, I know that, when the Scottish National Party Government came in in 2007, there was concern that there was not any buy-in from the civil servants who were there, who did not think that the SNP was gonnae win and that, if it did, it was gonnae last six weeks and that Tavish Scott, as was famously said, was gonnae come in. Of course, that did not happen.
Civil servants are appointed to ministers. That is not how we, as łÉČËżěĘÖ, recruit our own staff in our own constituency offices, many of whom we have known for years; sometimes we have not known them that long, but they tend to be much more open about their political views with us.
How can we build that trust in such circumstances? Personal relationships are obviously key, but how can we do so on a broader basis?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
I think that, from a politician’s point of view, there are some ministers who fear that they will be perceived as having a “Yes Minister” kind of relationship and that they will not be the ones who are running the show in their own departments, or that that is how it will sometimes be perceived. That can perhaps make relationships a wee bit difficult.
I will end on the “policy cycle” and “policy spirograph” images on page 17. Will you talk us through that a wee bit?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Well, the floor is yours.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Good morning, and welcome to the eighth meeting in 2023 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. Our first agenda item is an evidence session with Professor Paul Cairney to inform our inquiry into effective Scottish Government decision making. Professor Cairney is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Stirling and an adviser to the committee. As part of our inquiry, the committee commissioned Professor Cairney to provide a research paper on effective Government decision making, which has been shared with committee members. I welcome Professor Cairney to the meeting.
Before I invite Professor Cairney to make some opening remarks, I pass on apologies from Liz Smith, who is unable to make it to the meeting.
