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 1138 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Willie Rennie
The Presiding Officer has got it wrong before, too. That is the whole point. The system got it wrong. How do you know that you have got it right this time?
09:30Education, Children and Young People Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Willie Rennie
Section 8(5)(b) gives you the power to close colleges and universities, despite the fact that they never closed during the pandemic, because it is dangerous to close them. Animals would be at risk and laboratories would probably blow up, so those institutions are never closed. Nevertheless, you have taken on the possibility that you would have the power to close them, and that would be incredibly dangerous. Does that not prove the point that the micromanagement approach to these issues, with Government dictating what the institutions are doing, proves the point that we need to have a framework, rather than a prescriptive, approach?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Willie Rennie
Colleges and universities are not against preparations and measures. I think that there has been a misunderstanding about that. They are just arguing about how it is done. Last week, they said that they favoured a framework approach rather than the prescriptive approach in the bill. I have a couple of questions that I think make that point.
Dundee and Angus College runs animal care and zoology courses. Does the Government understand how to run those courses? Of course it does not. City of Glasgow College had 245 students at sea during the pandemic. Does the Government understand how to run nautical courses? Of course it does not. Nonetheless, the powers that you are proposing to take on are quite wide ranging.
10:30Section 8(5)(a) enables ministers to “confer additional functions”. Section 8(5)(i) enables ministers to require universities and colleges to take
“actions in general terms, or ... particular actions, that ... Ministers consider appropriate”.
Those powers are very wide ranging. Why are you leaving open the possibility that you would take over functions to run those institutions directly when, to be frank, you do not have a clue how to run them?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Willie Rennie
Are there any barriers in principle to the data sharing, or is it just a matter of working through the technicalities? Why is it taking so long?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Willie Rennie
That is fine.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Willie Rennie
I am sorry, but the commissioner’s office is not making such an argument. It is arguing that we should use this time to work up emergency powers at a reasonable pace for implementation in an emergency rather than put them in place now, when there is no emergency. The commissioner’s office argues that we should take our time now to get this right because, as we will discuss later, there are serious questions about the prescriptive model that you are adopting.
Why are we not taking our time to produce something now for implementation later? I know that there is more time now to consider the bill than there would be in an emergency—I am not arguing about that, and that is not what the commissioner’s office is talking about. It says that we should prepare draft emergency legislation now so that it can be implemented when an emergency arises.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Willie Rennie
I have one final question. Does the fact that you never used these powers throughout the pandemic, and they were never required to be used, not just prove the point that the colleges and universities are making, which is that the powers within the original emergency act were too prescriptive and it would never have been possible to use them for that very reason? If they were never used before in that format, why on earth are we replicating what we never used before because it was too prescriptive? Why not take the framework approach, which is far more sensible and, in fact, the way that you worked the last time?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Willie Rennie
How do the proposed powers impact on the Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Act 2005?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Willie Rennie
I have a final question. I commend the Government for the fairness and reasonableness of its approach through the pandemic. There is no doubt that there was consensus. You brought us in and we engaged.
There is absolutely no guarantee that that will continue. You are now asking this Parliament to give you permanent powers for an emergency on the basis that you are nice and reasonable people. However, this Parliament cannot guarantee that that will be the case for evermore, so you are asking Parliament to take a big step in giving you those powers for evermore on the basis that you are fair and reasonable people. You are that now, but that might not be the case in the future. That is why I think that there is a real danger that you are asking us to do more than we should be doing.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 2 March 2022
Willie Rennie
Megan Farr, you have given a pragmatic response and set out a potential way ahead that deals with the concerns that some of my colleagues, including Fergus Ewing, expressed earlier about the need to respond quickly in an emergency while making sure that we do not have permanent and disproportionate emergency powers.
There are two elements to this. There is the length of time that the powers are in place and there is the content of those powers. In an earlier session, we heard that leaders of various higher education institutions think that what is proposed is micromanaging far too much, that there should be broad principles and that they should be allowed to get on with implementing them. There is a debate about whether that is right, and then there is the debate about the length of time.
I would like you to comment on the content aspect, if that is okay. Are you saying that we should use the time now to debate the content and then have the legislation ready to roll if the event were to happen again? Are you saying that, perhaps rather than legislating now, we should debate now and get it ready?
