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 2881 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 7 February 2023
John Mason
This is not my area of expertise. However, councils tell me that all local authorities agreed that there could be an increase in fixed-penalty charges but that the issue seems to have got stuck somewhere.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 7 February 2023
John Mason
I do not want to go over too much old ground, although it is a temptation.
Recently, the International Monetary Fund said that the UK economy, unlike that of most other competitors, will not grow this year. Last week, interest rates went up to 4 per cent. Will either of those issues have an impact on next year’s budget?
10:30Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget (Scotland) (No 2) Bill: Stage 2
Meeting date: 7 February 2023
John Mason
Yes!
Members indicated agreement.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 7 February 2023
John Mason
You suggested that you might be able to give councils a bit more flexibility. Another example that councils gave me was that some money is ring fenced for the health and social care partnerships, but any savings that can be made between the health board and the partnership cannot be moved out to help another part of the council that is under more pressure. Would you consider flexibility in relation to that kind of thing?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 7 February 2023
John Mason
Okay. Another suggestion that has been made to me is about teacher numbers. Pupil to teacher ratios vary around the country’s councils. I do not think that any of us wants to reduce the number of teachers, but it was suggested that Glasgow and some other councils have an above-average ratio at the moment and could perhaps have flexibility to at least move to the national average instead of having that extra investment.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Monitoring Covid-19 Recovery
Meeting date: 19 January 2023
John Mason
You have said that the way that we use the term “spending review” is a bit different from the way that other countries use it, so I wonder whether we are comparing like with like. From what I can see, for us, a spending review involves looking at the big picture and the overall budget over a few years, whereas, in one of the examples that was given, Germany had a spending review of one part of transport. That seemed to involve looking at one much more specific area in a lot more detail and, as you said, seeing whether the spending was useful. Are we comparing like with like when we use the term “spending review”?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Monitoring Covid-19 Recovery
Meeting date: 19 January 2023
John Mason
Can you give us examples of any countries that have undertaken such a review that has led to major changes in how they do things? I am particularly interested in preventative spending: spending more to prevent things from happening, whether that be ill health or crime, for example. We struggle—I think that this is the same for other countries—to disinvest in secondary expenditure.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Monitoring Covid-19 Recovery
Meeting date: 19 January 2023
John Mason
That makes a lot of sense, because my feeling is that we need both processes. If we take the example of health, which is our largest area of expenditure, we know that we spend too much on reactive health spending, such as hospitals, and not enough on community healthcare, such as general practitioners. The challenge that we find is how to switch spending from one area to the other. Would the type of spending reviews that other countries use help us to do that better?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 19 January 2023
John Mason
It would be fair to say that we have struggled with that.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 19 January 2023
John Mason
On a slightly different issue, we have just had an evidence session with the OECD. You came in straight after the session, so I do not know whether you were able to see any of it. There was quite an interesting discussion around spending reviews, in which we established that the OECD’s definition of a spending review is slightly different from ours. Its definition is based more on the fact that other countries look at specific areas. For example, Germany had a spending review of transport that really looked in depth at what the Government was already spending, to see whether it could make savings and move forward.
I asked the witnesses whether we could learn from that. For example, we could look at the health service and say, “We are spending all this money on reactive care, but we would like to move more into preventative primary care.” The feeling overall was that maybe we could learn from other countries. Is there anything in that space? I realise that that is a new topic, but can we do anything about examining present expenditure to see whether we can free up more of it? Are we already doing that?
