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 2371 contributions
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Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny
Meeting date: 6 October 2022
Mark Ruskell
Should there be an expectation that, if councils are raising funds in that way, a proportion of them should go towards supporting cultural institutions, or should the use of such funds be purely at the discretion of councils?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny
Meeting date: 6 October 2022
Mark Ruskell
I was reflecting on your points about the short-life working group and the mainstreaming of cultural work across other colleagues’ departments. How transparent will that be in the forthcoming budget? Will we be able to look at the health or justice budget, say, and see a thread of cultural and wellbeing work with numbers attached to it, ideally, that might or might not add up to 1 per cent, but which, regardless of that, will actually show what impact that work will have in the forthcoming year and where the spend will work in a cross-departmental way? Is it too early to have that kind of transparency in the budget?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny
Meeting date: 6 October 2022
Mark Ruskell
I want to follow up Mr Cameron’s question and your reflection on that eternal question about short-term funding or “projectism”, as I think that it is called. It is a question that needs an answer, because I see a lot of public money being wasted due to the fact that projects have to eternally reinvent themselves. That wastes core staff time, which is spent on funding applications and trying to develop new projects on the back of those. What organisations really need is multiyear long-term funding to enable them to get to a place where they might well innovate and move into a different space. However, in the meantime, they need a space to grow into that. You mentioned the power of convening. How do you answer that question? How do you crack that issue, because it has been there for years and it is grinding the entire voluntary sector down—not just in the culture sector but in many other sectors.
I see an official nodding at that.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill
Meeting date: 4 October 2022
Mark Ruskell
Do you to have any other points to raise on the detail? You mentioned a sense of vagueness.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill
Meeting date: 4 October 2022
Mark Ruskell
Environmental assessment is a well-established practice and relates to the habitats directive. There are a set of tests, including a public interest test, that apply. Again, we are speculating as to what may or may not happen, but do you see that practice of appropriate assessment and the application of key tests continuing? Alternatively, if we look at other bills that are being introduced, can we see a potential change in relation to habitats as well, which would seriously impact on assessment?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 4 October 2022
Mark Ruskell
I raised this point with Michael Gove, who actually took it quite seriously. If there is an evaluation process, could that lead to increased animal testing if particular products, or any active ingredients within them, effectively have to be re-evaluated?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill
Meeting date: 4 October 2022
Mark Ruskell
The witnesses have already touched on some areas that I want to ask about. I want to get a bit more information from them about part 5 of the bill, and particularly the clauses that set out how the new system will work. Some aspects of that have already been covered, but I would like to go round the witnesses and get their views on the specifics of what is currently laid out and how it will work.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill
Meeting date: 4 October 2022
Mark Ruskell
Is there clarity over which plans and programmes might be captured?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 4 October 2022
Mark Ruskell
I just want to raise the issue of the potential for increased animal testing, which has been raised in relation to the implementation of REACH.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 4 October 2022
Mark Ruskell
We would hope that would be the case, too.
I want to ask about the potential for increased animal testing, which is something that has been raised in relation to the registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals regulation.
