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 成人快手 and committees will automatically update to show only the 成人快手 and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of 成人快手 and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of 成人快手 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 1366 contributions
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Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Social Security Scotland
Meeting date: 2 December 2021
Miles Briggs
Yes.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Social Security Scotland
Meeting date: 2 December 2021
Miles Briggs
Will that have an impact on future forecasting? Off the top of my head, you are at 10 per cent operating costs to delivery, and the DWP is at 6.4 per cent. Do you see that cost increasing, as is currently laid out in the to-date costs?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 2 December 2021
Miles Briggs
Beyond that group, is any other assessment or review taking place? The issue has opened up an area where it is important that more work takes place to see whether the regulations might be changed to fit the real world that we live in. What additional work does the Government intend to do on the issue?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 2 December 2021
Miles Briggs
I want to ask a few questions about shared care. The regulations seem very clunky and do not take into account separated parents, for example, who might equally share care for their child or children. Have ministers looked at some solutions to that, such as a 50:50 split in the provision of that benefit?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Social Security Scotland
Meeting date: 2 December 2021
Miles Briggs
Yes.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Social Security Scotland
Meeting date: 2 December 2021
Miles Briggs
Why have staffing requirements increased so much since the programme鈥檚 business case was published in February 2020, given that the key policy decisions for in-house assessment, local delivery and plans around the Scottish child payment, for example, had already been made at that point? Also, given the recent announcements by the First Minister, will the organisation grow beyond the 3,500 staff that are currently envisaged?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Social Security Scotland
Meeting date: 2 December 2021
Miles Briggs
What size do you expect the organisation to be, given the change from the initial estimates to the 3,500 we see now?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Social Security Scotland
Meeting date: 2 December 2021
Miles Briggs
Yes, thank you, convener. The question is about spend and budgets, which is probably the most important stuff. What is your view of the variance that we have seen between budget and actual spend to date?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 2 December 2021
Miles Briggs
That is helpful. Reading into that, has any work been done on how that could disincentivise people鈥攕eparated parents specifically鈥攆rom taking a shared-care approach?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Social Security Scotland
Meeting date: 2 December 2021
Miles Briggs
That is very helpful. This will be my final question on staffing. What is the organisation鈥檚 strategy on skill sets? We touched on that in our conversations. You are looking to recruit 400 advisers for hubs across the country. What workforce challenges have you discovered in doing that? Concern was expressed about the potential destabilisation of other services if individuals who are currently working on the front line elsewhere come into Social Security Scotland. That may have been specifically about Dundee, given that you have already been drawing on the recruitment pool there. That was one of the conversations we had. Where are you with that specialist skill set strategy and identifying individuals?
