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 ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and committees will automatically update to show only the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ 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 3369 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Economic and Fiscal Forecasts, Resource Spending Review and Medium-term Financial Strategy
Meeting date: 7 June 2022
John Mason
Does it make any difference to the economy that the Scottish Government is putting money into social security, which is clearly its focus? That money is going into the pockets of certain groups and on from there. That is in contrast to money that goes to Scottish Enterprise, which might go to international companies.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Economic and Fiscal Forecasts, Resource Spending Review and Medium-term Financial Strategy
Meeting date: 7 June 2022
John Mason
We spent quite a lot of time with the Scottish Fiscal Commission earlier this morning looking at inflation from different angles. Professor Breedon talked about the previous, old-fashioned spiral in the 1970s and 1980s when wages and costs chased each other up. The Scottish Fiscal Commission representatives seem to think that that will not happen this time. They are predicting a real earnings decrease of 2.7 per cent. What is your angle on that? Will there have to be a reduction in real earnings because wage increases will not be able to match inflation for a period?
12:00Finance and Public Administration Committee
Skills Development Scotland
Meeting date: 31 May 2022
John Mason
Are we making progress on getting more women into certain professions or, generally, into the workforce? We have often heard that, if women were setting up businesses at the same rate as men, the economy would be much better off. I suspect that that applies to various sectors—the economy would be better off if more women were high up in the engineering sector and all sorts of places.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Skills Development Scotland
Meeting date: 31 May 2022
John Mason
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework: Ambitions into Action
Meeting date: 31 May 2022
John Mason
As far as I am aware, the public are not getting excited about the national performance framework—none of them sends me abusive emails about it, although they do about other things. Is that important, Deputy First Minister? You seem to be saying that the thinking is the important thing. We, the local authorities, charities and the third sector are all thinking about the values in the NPF but not necessarily talking about them using those words. Are you satisfied with that, or would it be better if more people throughout society were talking about the national performance framework?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework: Ambitions into Action
Meeting date: 31 May 2022
John Mason
The idea that we should not work in silos and that we should be collaborative has come up quite a lot, and I fully agree with it. The counter to that—a slightly different suggestion—from some organisations is that it would help for organisations such as local authorities, universities or the health service to be tied more into specific outcomes, rather than everybody being responsible for everything. The thinking is that it is harder to hold bodies such as NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde to account if they are responsible for everything, whereas it is easier to hold them to account if they are responsible for one or two things.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Skills Development Scotland
Meeting date: 31 May 2022
John Mason
I take your point, Mr Brodie, that there is a difference between skills and education. However, are we sending too many people to university?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Skills Development Scotland
Meeting date: 31 May 2022
John Mason
That is a fair point. I am an accountant, actually. Perhaps the situation is not as simple as I was suggesting. The idea of graduate apprentices is an extremely good one.
You talked about aligning with the needs of the future, or words to that effect. I am not asking you to do it, but how easy is it for anyone to predict what we will need in the future? I presume that that is why we have the census—I will plug people completing the census today.
During my lifetime, or while I have been a member of the Scottish Parliament, in some years we have said that we have trained too many teachers, but in other years we have said that we have not trained enough teachers. The same applies to nurses and some other professions. Is future need incredibly difficult to predict?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Skills Development Scotland
Meeting date: 31 May 2022
John Mason
I was going to ask about that in a supplementary question. You have people in schools; I hope that you can assure me that they are working on this. When I speak to young people when I visit schools, I get the impression that many girls have just not thought about engineering. That is because of peer pressure or their families feeling that they should not go into those jobs. If you can show us figures that show that we are making progress, that will be encouraging. I get a bit despondent at times.
12:00Finance and Public Administration Committee
Skills Development Scotland
Meeting date: 31 May 2022
John Mason
I absolutely agree with that.
The other thing that I will touch on is the other end of people’s lives—early retirement. It can be argued that people retiring early—especially highly skilled people—is having a negative effect on the productivity of the country as a whole. I have highly skilled friends who are the same age as me who have already retired. Maybe I should be considering it, as well. Is that a bad thing? It provides an opportunity for a younger person to come into a highly skilled job. In terms of the national performance framework, we have other aims in society—for the environment, for example. People who retire early might voluntarily get involved in some of those things. How do we get the balance right?
