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 2597 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Colin Beattie
There seems to be an element of user pushback on some of these things—especially bus gates. There is an issue with those here in Edinburgh, and I think that there will be a partial reversal. Is there a consistent thread of consumer dissonance over the works that are being done?
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Colin Beattie
Is this perhaps an aspect of a fundamental change? We all talk about the pre-Covid footfall in shops, museums, public places and so on, and we always say that it has not gone back to pre-Covid levels. We are talking about how the use of public transport has not gone back to the pre-Covid level. Has there been a fundamental change within society that we need to understand to make some of these initiatives effective?
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Colin Beattie
I will say, though, that the word “domestic” implies “domestic”. It does not imply public transport, trucks or commercial vehicles.
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Colin Beattie
The problem with national conversations is that they usually pull in the same people every time, so you do not get down to where you want to get to.
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Colin Beattie
In that case, I will move on to bus services.
Bus services are often cited as being a problem. People who talk about giving up their cars say that the public bus service is very poor—which is true in some areas. To what extent is it true that the lack of buses affects the travel decisions that people make, and what is contributing to that?
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Colin Beattie
It seems that there are alternatives to subsidies for bus routes that operators consider to be less lucrative—I refer to routes that bus operators expect the Government or the local council to top up in order for them to provide the service. Therefore, the scope to expand bus services is somewhat limited, because the cost of subsidising those routes is met by the public purse. How are we going to achieve that expansion?
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Colin Beattie
Has the Government done any evaluation work to assess the impact of existing funding of bus and rail services on reducing car use?
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Colin Beattie
Over what length of period would you expect to collect the data in order for it to be a meaningful indicator of where we are going?
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Colin Beattie
So, the breakdown of emissions excludes commercial vehicles and public transport. Is that correct?
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Colin Beattie
So, those emissions are included under domestic transport.
