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 łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees will automatically update to show only the łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of łÉČËżěĘÖ 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 2904 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
John Mason
I will come back to you on that, but I will let Mr Black come in first.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
John Mason
I am sorry to interrupt you. Do you agree that, often, people give their views and then the Government, the committee or whoever says, “We have heard and considered your views, but we disagree with them”, yet people think that they have not been heard at all?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Long Covid Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
John Mason
I take your point that there might be general public awareness of long Covid, but we continue to have problems in certain sectors of the community that are not engaged with health services anyway. Men in more deprived areas hardly ever engage unless there is something very seriously wrong, and vaccine uptake tends to be worse among some ethnic minorities and in poorer areas. What work are we doing—and what could we do—to engage with the people who have not been so engaged in the past?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Long Covid Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
John Mason
There is a lot of misinformation, which the committee looked at previously, about vaccines and vaccine damage. I do not know whether you agree, but it is my view that it would help if we could get some simple figures out, such as the one that I still use a lot, which is that vaccines saved 20 million lives. I assume that the number has gone up, although I still use that figure. Simple messages like that might get through to people. Someone came into my office last Friday who was still very wary of the vaccines and needed some reassurance.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Long Covid Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
John Mason
Yes—I think that we had evidence earlier that a lot of the people with long Covid had Covid before there was a vaccine available. Is that broadly the case?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Long Covid Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
John Mason
Okay, thanks.
Comparisons with myalgic encephalomyelitis have come through in the inquiry. ME has been around for 40 years—or, at least, it has been recognised for that length of time. We all know sufferers of ME. We have never found a cure for or an answer to it, and it has been difficult to pin down. Is that where we are going with long Covid—that it will continue to be incredibly difficult to pin down and we will probably not get one simple solution?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Long Covid Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
John Mason
On the theme of educating people, we would expect that, in the health service, there would be a good understanding of long Covid, but a lot of other employers, such as those in the private sector, might not understand the condition and what they could and should do to support employees. Is any work going on, or can any work go on, for employers, such as small employers who do not know an awful lot about the topic?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
John Mason
Professor Cairney, your paper is full of contrasts or, some would say, paradoxes. Colleagues have mentioned a few, and I will mention a few more.
Under the heading “Fostering equity, fairness, or justice”, you talk about the focus
“on efficiency, using economic tools … to identify how to produce the highest benefits from the same costs”,
but you say that policy
“should also prioritise the fair distribution of costs and benefits.”
Is it not possible to be efficient and fair?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
John Mason
That touches on one of the other issues that I want to raise, which is mentioned later in your report. It concerns the idea of decentralisation, flexibility, collaborative working and all those sorts of things, as against setting a clear ambition for national accountability.
I suppose that I would feel that that is the case; you can either go too far one way or too far the other. If there is a clear, driving ambition from central Government, that means that local government and everyone else will get squashed. On the other hand, however, if you allow local government—or local health boards or local anything—to do whatever it wants, there is no coherence to that. I feel that, ultimately, that is impossible to square.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
John Mason
Everything that you say leads to more possible questions, but I will ask you just one more. I go back to what you say in your report, under the heading “Responsible and accountable government”, with regard to who the łÉČËżěĘÖ and elected members are. You say that there should be “a clear link between” how the citizens vote and members of Parliament, and therefore the Executive. I do not know whether we have that at the moment.
I am more interested in the second bullet point, in which you refer to
“The recruitment of elected politicians from a diverse pool of candidates, to boost the representativeness of parliaments in relation to social background.”
We have tried to get a balance between men and women. What could we do to really get a cross-section of society in Parliament? Is that another impossibility?
10:45