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 3369 contributions
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COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Vaccination Certification
Meeting date: 23 September 2021
John Mason
We have a situation now in which our hospitals are struggling and the Scottish Ambulance Service is swamped. We must take action. From listening to your answers so far, I wonder whether it would be cleaner and neater from a human rights and equalities point of view just to close all the nightclubs, stop all the football matches with attendance over 10,000 and stop all the concerts. That would prevent any human rights issues, would it not? It would just be cleaner. Would that be your preference?
09:30COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Vaccination Certification
Meeting date: 23 September 2021
John Mason
Perhaps Professor Montgomery will come in. I have been looking at the Ada Lovelace Institute paper from May, in which there was an emphasis on things such as testing behavioural impacts. That is all very well if we have time but, surely, we do not have time to do all that kind of stuff when we have to act quickly.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
John Mason
Covid has been mentioned, and I take all the points that have been made on how that has made it more difficult to get the data. However, if something worsens—and my guess is that quite a few indicators will worsen because of Covid—will it be possible to clearly separate how much of that is because of Covid and how much is for other reasons? For example, an indicator might be improving for various reasons, but Covid has dragged it down.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
John Mason
So the national performance framework sits in the background, even if it is not always specifically mentioned.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
John Mason
You talked about whether we are making enough progress on, for example, climate change or child poverty. That brings us back to the question of whether there should be time-limited targets among all this. The convener mentioned that we do not have those so much now, because it is more about continuous improvement, although in relation to climate change, we have a lot of time-limited targets. Are you happy that the switch from time-limited targets to continuous improvement has been the right one, or do we need to shift the approach?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
John Mason
We have covered a lot of ground already. I think that it was Daniel Johnson who made the point that ministers do not often come to Parliament to talk about the national performance framework. It can also be argued that the rest of us in Parliament—back benchers and Opposition members—do not often ask questions about the national performance framework.
Should we all be concerned that it does not have the high profile that numbers of nurses, police officers or ambulances have? We all get excited about those numbers. Should we do more to promote the national performance framework, or is it not a problem?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
John Mason
The result of that is that a lot of the public do not know what it is.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Vaccination Certification
Meeting date: 16 September 2021
John Mason
Mr Stevenson, you were laying it on pretty thick that this is going to be impossible to do, but the reality is that loads of other countries have vaccination passports. I think that Greece started its system in July, and France, Switzerland and many others have such a system. They seem to have managed it, so what is the big problem here?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Vaccination Certification
Meeting date: 16 September 2021
John Mason
My next question is for Dr McMillan from the Law Society. I was interested in what your submission says about the concept of discrimination. You suggested that there had been a case—I will not even try to pronounce it, but it was in the Czech Republic—in which the courts said that it was not discrimination and that it is legal to have passports, certificates or something along those lines. That case particularly affected children.
On the other hand, you raise the point that introduction of a certificate could be discrimination under the Equality Act 2010 because certain groups have not been vaccinated. Will you tell us where you are with that? Is the law changing? Are we uncertain?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Ministerial Statement, Coronavirus Act Reports and Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 16 September 2021
John Mason
My understanding is that quite a few countries have used vaccination certificates already, so I presume that we can learn from them. For example, I understand that Greece announced its scheme on 28 May and that there was a big uptake of vaccinations in June before the certificates came into operation in July. I do not know whether you saw the previous evidence session; in it, Mr Doncaster argued that we should be more like France, where vaccination certificates are required for entry everywhere, so that the scheme would be simple and understood by everyone. What have we learned from other countries’ experiences?
