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 2855 contributions
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Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 23 November 2023
John Mason
Ms Ritchie Allan, do you think that having a council would inevitably mean an increase in the benefits that are paid out?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 23 November 2023
John Mason
Another financial issue is the cost of the benefits. Lorna Glen, you and other witnesses have suggested that more people would be entitled to benefits. Have you done any work on what that might cost?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 23 November 2023
John Mason
I take your point about preventative action—this could save money for employers, the state and so on. If the scenario was that the Scottish council could only do preventative work, give advice and do research and the total amount of benefits stayed static—I believe that the figure is about £78 million—would it still be worth going ahead?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 23 November 2023
John Mason
Where would you suggest that the extra money should come from? Should the Scottish Government take it off teachers’ salaries?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 23 November 2023
John Mason
I was impressed, I have to say, by the STUC—
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 23 November 2023
John Mason
Okay. I ask Mr McKenzie to respond.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 23 November 2023
John Mason
We can ask future witnesses about that, unless anyone particularly wants to come in on that point.
In your written submissions, some of you have talked about the importance of research, yet only £30,000 has been put down for that annually. Linda Somerville, is that enough?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 23 November 2023
John Mason
I will move on to finances. I do not know whether the witnesses heard some of the questions at the end of the previous evidence session. First, the financial memorandum gives the set-up costs as £149,000. I do not know whether any of you are IT experts, but that figure includes £50,000 for IT and website set-up. Do you think that that will be enough?
Similarly, the running costs are expected to be £372,000 per year. Paul O’Kane has already mentioned that research is less than 10 per cent of that, at £30,000, which seems quite a small amount. Do you have you any thoughts about those figures? Are they reasonable or unreasonable? Somebody said that IIAC is underresourced. Was that you, Ms Ritchie Allan?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 23 November 2023
John Mason
Assuming that SEIAC is set up and there is all that unmet demand out there, including in relation to women, football injuries and all the rest of it, will the amount of benefit that we pay out therefore inevitably increase?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 23 November 2023
John Mason
I get your point that there might be savings to the health service in the long run, say, but, at the moment, we are considering a budget of something like £78 million in benefits. The Scottish Government does not have any spare money that I am aware of to pay for that. We could say, “Let’s take it off the NHS, as the health service will save in the long run.” Is it worth having the new council, however, if we are still stuck with paying that £78 million?
