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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Displaying 2597 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
“Planning for Skills”
Meeting date: 10 March 2022
Colin Beattie
To learn lessons, we have to understand what went wrong. Here we have failure in leadership and, it would appear, a failure of the sponsor teams to properly engage and raise the issues that were quite clearly there. I am surprised that we do not have that information—that such an investigation has not taken place. Without it, how do we learn the lessons?
Public Audit Committee
“Planning for Skills”
Meeting date: 10 March 2022
Colin Beattie
I mean feedback to the Scottish Government. The report says that
“the Scottish Government lacked clear oversight” .
I would have expected there to have been feedback to the Scottish Government from at least two sources, one being overall management and the other being the sponsor teams.
Public Audit Committee
“Planning for Skills”
Meeting date: 10 March 2022
Colin Beattie
Given that the letters are due fairly soon, perhaps it might be possible to share them with the committee. It would be useful for us to see them.
Public Audit Committee
“Planning for Skills”
Meeting date: 10 March 2022
Colin Beattie
There has been a history, which has been over an extended period, of a divergence in views—I will not call it a “clash of cultures”—as to the future line of march. How has that been overcome? Why is it different now? Have people changed? Have heads been knocked together? How has that been resolved?
Public Audit Committee
“Social care briefing”
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Colin Beattie
Who needs to knock heads together to make that happen?
Public Audit Committee
“Social care briefing”
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Colin Beattie
I am very conscious that, as the Auditor General mentioned, the issue of local collaboration has been raised several times in Audit Scotland reports during my 11 years on this committee, yet nothing seems to progress. You say that some places are better than others, but all places should have a level of collaboration that achieves the outcomes that the Government and everyone else is seeking. What has to happen?
It cannot go on that Audit Scotland churns out reports saying that there is a lack of collaboration locally that is impairing progress. I say that it cannot go on like that, but it has done. How do we break that?
Public Audit Committee
“Social care briefing”
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Colin Beattie
Is it about money? Are people simply job-hopping for more money?
Public Audit Committee
“Social care briefing”
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Colin Beattie
As part of the process of formulating a national care service and getting it in place, we really need good data behind it to ensure that it will be effective. Is that correct?
Public Audit Committee
“Social care briefing”
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Colin Beattie
Auditor General, this is not the first time that we have seen adverse comments about leadership in your reports. Leadership is mentioned in paragraph 20 of the briefing. You call for “stable and collaborative leadership”. That sounds like a fairly basic thing that we would expect to be in place.
You mention that councils and integration authorities are experiencing
“high turnover of senior staff”.
In the past, you have said that the situation is the same in the NHS. Why is there such a high turnover of senior staff across the public sector? Until a few years ago, generally speaking, that was not the case, so what has triggered the change?
Public Audit Committee
“Social care briefing”
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Colin Beattie
I have one more thing to add before Antony Clark comes in.
I can understand there being an issue with stability if there is churn in the senior staff, which can create a vacuum until the person who moves in has got up to speed and got to grips with the job. What I do not understand is the lack of collaboration. Collaboration should be fundamental and embedded, regardless of stability. Why does that collaboration not exist?
