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 1222 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body Budget (Website)
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
Liz Smith
Thank you. That is very helpful and encouraging.
My final point comes back to what the Presiding Officer said—you have alluded to this already—about one of the reasons for the redesign being to ensure that the website is more accessible and user friendly for members of the public and people who are outside this building. What are we doing to measure the responses of those stakeholders so that we know that what we have done is helping people to understand this place a bit better and to contribute to it?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework: Ambitions into Action
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
Liz Smith
I will explore two themes, the first of which is based on some comments that were made to the committee last week. I cannot give names, because it was a private session, but the meeting included some very senior officials in local government and the third sector. They all agreed that the national performance framework is a good thing in principle, but when they discussed its workability, they used adjectives such as “ethereal”, “anodyne”, “top-heavy” and “theoretical” to describe it. A couple of people added that they did not feel that the national performance framework was necessary, because, if they were doing their job properly, they should be already be doing the things that it sets out. I thought that that was quite an interesting reflection from people in local government who are on the front line of putting a lot of policies into practice. We were talking particularly about improvements in addressing child poverty in Dundee. How do you respond to that?
That picks up on a comment that Dr Elliott made about the Christie commission principles. If we are to get better outcomes and better wellbeing, should we be doing that through local initiatives—local people know best what works well in their local community—rather than having this big “scaffolding”, as Ms Wallace described it. There is a dilemma: there is too much at the general, national framework level, when what we really want are things that work very well locally. Could you give us your reflections on that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework: Ambitions into Action
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
Liz Smith
I will pick up on that point. Can that be localised? I ask that because participants in a couple of the groups at last week’s workshops were very clear that they wanted more local autonomy to decide what the best thing was for wellbeing in their area.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body Budget (Website)
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
Liz Smith
Thank you.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework: Ambitions into Action
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
Liz Smith
The participants also pointed out that that approach is better for ownership, because people in that community feel that they have devised the policies that are working. That is successful in getting people to understand them better and in getting them well motivated to deliver them. I thought that that was quite a strong point.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body Budget (Website)
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
Liz Smith
Is the feedback from people who are outwith the building relatively positive?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Administration in the Scottish Government
Meeting date: 3 May 2022
Liz Smith
My final point is about the relationship between Government and civil service. Permanent secretary, you have good knowledge of the Westminster situation and will be well aware that there were issues with that relationship down south. Had it not been for Covid, there would have been further investigation into the relationship, which is critical.
In Scotland, there are now question marks over the relationship between Government and civil service. As you know, a few weeks ago, a senior civil servant was sent out to the media to bat on behalf of Scottish Government ministers about a particular issue. That puts into question whose job it is to defend or, in some cases, promote particular Government policies. Is it appropriate for a senior civil servant to be sent out to the media, as was the case for Professor Jason Leitch, to defend a particular decision in which there is a question mark over a ministerial action?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Administration in the Scottish Government
Meeting date: 3 May 2022
Liz Smith
To clarify that point, are you suggesting that the civil service requires additional resources to ensure that it can do its job properly and effectively? You mentioned that the part of the inquiry about why the events happened might reflect institutional issues. Is that correct?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Appointments)
Meeting date: 3 May 2022
Liz Smith
Good morning, Dr Lombardi. You have correctly identified that forecasting is by no means an exact science—I could not agree more with that comment. From your international expertise and considerable experience, do you believe that there are countries around the world where the accuracy of forecasting is a little better, because of the modelling that is used? Would we be able to apply some of the best practice to what the Scottish Fiscal Commission does?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Appointments)
Meeting date: 3 May 2022
Liz Smith
That is very helpful. One of the bigger challenges is about the timescale and the lag between the different sets of statistics coming out, albeit that they are independent. The committee has certainly had some difficulty with that challenge, in that witnesses have given evidence to the committee arguing that their job is very difficult because of that time lag. It is an interesting challenge.
