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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Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 30 March 2023
Richard Leonard
We very much appreciate that. We also appreciate your response to Willie Coffey’s questions about sharing the legal advice. That has been a bit of a bugbear of ours, so we would really appreciate greater transparency on it.
Thank you very much for your evidence.
I suspend the meeting to allow for a change of witnesses.
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Public Audit Committee
Auditor General for Scotland (Work Programme)
Meeting date: 30 March 2023
Richard Leonard
Under agenda item 3, we will take evidence from the Auditor General and his team on their work programme for the next period of time.
I welcome Stephen Boyle, the Auditor General for Scotland, who is joined by Gemma Diamond, director at Audit Scotland, and Mark Taylor, audit director at Audit Scotland.
As usual, we have a series of questions that we would like to put to you, Auditor General. To begin with, also as usual, I ask you to make a short opening statement to get us under way.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 30 March 2023
Richard Leonard
If you could write to us, not now, but subsequent to today’s session, with the comparable figure for the current date, that would be a useful measure for us to understand whether things are back to a level that most people would recognise.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 30 March 2023
Richard Leonard
I think that my next point also came up at the SPPA Committee meeting. You have touched on this, but I can safely say on behalf of the Public Audit Committee that we would be very supportive of welfare support being in place for respondents and, in particular, people who have lodged complaints. It seems a little bit unbalanced to have an apparatus through which complaints can be processed without having a wraparound support mechanism for people. If you and the Standards Commission are making those representations, we would be supportive of that.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 30 March 2023
Richard Leonard
Thank you very much for your evidence, which has been very useful. You are right, Mr Bruce: we hope that we do not see you next year either, because that would indicate how much progress had been made. It has been a valuable session for us. Thank you very much for coming in and giving us the answers to some of our questions.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 30 March 2023
Richard Leonard
Yes. I do not recommend that, Mr Bruce.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 30 March 2023
Richard Leonard
One of the alarm bell figures that we have seen over the past couple of years is the statistic about the numbers of complaints that were or were not progressed. There is a contrast between two years. We were told that, in 2016-17, 43 per cent of complaints against councillors and members of public boards were not pursued—i.e. 57 per cent were pursued—but, by the time that we get to 2020-21, 84 per cent of such complaints were not pursued. That big contrast was one of the things that sent out a clear signal that people had lost confidence in the system and that something was going wrong. You might want to reflect on that, but could you tell us the current figures for complaints against councillors and public board members? We will take that as the test area, to find out what the figures are now.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 30 March 2023
Richard Leonard
I think that that is a provocative question that you have put, Mr Bruce. We do not want you to go through all the recommendations now. I will say what we are interested in as the Public Audit Committee. If you sat here and said, “We’ve arrived and everything’s been done”, we would probably question whether that was probable or not, but we want to get a sense of how many of your 26 recommendations—or the 22 as accounted for by the audit—have been implemented. The auditors said that they thought that it was about half and half. Half had been fully implemented, to the credit of you and the people who work in the organisation, and half were—again, quite creditably—work in progress.
We recognise that some of these things are moving targets and that there are changes—it is a dynamic organisation. You coined a memorable phrase when you said that it is akin to rebuilding a plane in flight, which is a rather good way of putting it. You do not need to go through each recommendation individually, but can you say whether about half of the recommendations are still work in progress or whether more have been implemented? Are more of the recommendations ones that can readily be implemented so that you can say, “We’ve done that now and we can move on to something else”?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 30 March 2023
Richard Leonard
Okay—that is fine. I am conscious that we are coming towards the end of our session, but I know that the deputy convener, Sharon Dowey, has a series of questions that she wants to put to you, so we will finish with her.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 30 March 2023
Richard Leonard
May I seek verification on one point? All the reports that I have seen say that there is an eight-month wait for an initial assessment of a complaint. Did you tell us that that has now been cut to 13 weeks, which is just over three months?
