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 2810 contributions
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Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Housing and Refugees
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
John Mason
Have you seen that having a negative impact on people鈥檚 health?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Housing and Refugees
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
John Mason
So, however people come, there are problems with the system.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Housing and Refugees
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
John Mason
My first question is for Mr O鈥橬eill. The Scottish Refugee Council talked about the maximisation policy, as it is called, whereby adults who are not related or who do not know each other have to share rooms. Is that a bad thing? If so, why, and what is the impact on people?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Housing and Refugees
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
John Mason
Would that be just two people, or could more people share one room?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Housing and Refugees
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
John Mason
Do you think that the room sharing was part of the reason for that?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Housing and Refugees
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
John Mason
Mr Arnold, you might want to comment on that matter, but I will also ask you another question. Does the way that people have come here make any difference to their experience? In other words, is the experience of those who have been granted refugee status after seeking asylum different from that of people who came here through the UK resettlement scheme or, as you mentioned, the Afghan relocation scheme?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
John Mason
If we cannot do anything this year, would the Government think about going a bit further with the Scottish child payment in another year? Or, if you had extra money, would you prefer to move forward with some other benefit?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
John Mason
It is very unfortunate that Katy Clark came in and asked Jeremy Balfour鈥檚 question. She was late to the meeting and took over a question that had already been allocated to another member. I accept, however, that that is your prerogative, convener.
My question is about the Scottish child payment. There have been quite a lot of requests for it to increase by more than inflation. I note what you have said already, cabinet secretary鈥攁nd 拢6.3 billion is obviously a huge amount of money and a huge increase for the whole social security budget鈥攂ut did you take into account those requests for a higher increase for the Scottish child payment?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 20 February 2024
John Mason
That is what I feared. It seems that it does not matter what we do. As long as we have income tax and national insurance as they are in the UK, we have a real problem.
Moving on to another tax, you have commented on council tax reform and made the point that, as we know, there is no agreement or consensus on what should replace it. Some of us are getting a little bit frustrated. After all, we need to do something, but clearly nothing that we do will have 100 per cent support. Is the Government committed to making some kind of change fairly soon?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 20 February 2024
John Mason
As we have already covered quite a bit of ground, I will try not to be too repetitive.
Earlier, the convener raised the question of our relationship with the UK tax and national insurance system. It seems that the fundamental problem is that the UK has two income tax systems, namely income tax and national insurance, and they do not relate to each other at all well. Have you picked up any suggestion that the UK Government is even looking at that issue, thinking of combining those systems or anything like that?
