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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Economy and Fair Work Committee
Tourism and Hospitality
Meeting date: 2 February 2022
Colin Beattie
Good morning, panel. One thing that has come home to me in the course of evidence taking is the sheer complexity of the hospitality and tourism business. It is incredibly diverse, especially if we start taking into account local and international supply chains and so forth; then, we are talking about a fairly complicated beast to deal with. That makes it quite difficult to target support at one particular sector, because the knock-on effect all the way through businesses is extremely complex.
We have talked about various parts of the hospitality and tourism business. How would you describe the overall financial status of the business in terms of cash flows and—this is important—the levels of debt that some businesses might have taken on during the Covid emergency, as well as hangovers from before it? I ask Leon Thompson to kick off.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Tourism and Hospitality
Meeting date: 2 February 2022
Colin Beattie
We should have a huge reach in America, too. I remember standing on Ellis Island pressing the buttons for where people of Scottish ancestry were, and there were more than 20 million people scattered across America, particularly on the eastern seaboard. Surely we should be capitalising on that.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Tourism and Hospitality
Meeting date: 2 February 2022
Colin Beattie
You are basically talking about word-of-mouth advertising, which is effective, but if other countries are hard selling their products with more money than we have, how do we compensate for that? Once we get people here, they will have the experience and we hope that they will then go out and spread the word, but we have to get the people here first. The more money you have, the better chance you have to spread that word. Do we have enough money and resources to be able to do that in our target markets?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Tourism and Hospitality
Meeting date: 2 February 2022
Colin Beattie
Yes, you did.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 27 January 2022
Colin Beattie
Should I interpret from that that you have had specific discussions with the corporate body in connection with the issue?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 27 January 2022
Colin Beattie
We talked about sponsorship bodies. They cut across the whole Scottish Government. What are the specific concerns about sponsorship? Individual matters have come to the committee, but you see the full picture across the board. What is the fundamental problem with the sponsorship of public bodies?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 27 January 2022
Colin Beattie
I was kind of hoping that you would say yes.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 27 January 2022
Colin Beattie
Would it be correct to say that day-to-day risk management is adequate, and that you are talking about more remote possibilities? You quoted the question of a pandemic, which is clearly not something that anybody hoped would ever happen and the preparations for which are obviously very different. Would that be a fair analysis?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 27 January 2022
Colin Beattie
To turn this on its head, so to speak, what could have been done differently by all the external bodies that deal with the commissioner’s office in relation to the relationships that broke down? They must have known that there was a problem, and that problem did not happen overnight—it happened over an extended period. What should the external bodies have done to raise a flag about the issue? One external body raised a flag with the commissioner’s office. Did it go anyplace else? Did anybody else have sight of that?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 27 January 2022
Colin Beattie
Michael Oliphant specifically mentioned target dates. As he raised that matter, I presume that, in a significant number of cases, they are unrealistic. Have you had a discussion with the Scottish Government about that? Is there any prospect of more realism? It will always be thrown up as an anomaly. If someone does not meet their target date, that is bad and it is a black mark against them.
