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 ˿ and committees will automatically update to show only the ˿ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of ˿ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of ˿ 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 3231 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
“National Fraud Initiative in Scotland 2022”
Meeting date: 29 September 2022
Richard Leonard
Yes, a single bus journey of £3.10 may not be worthy of a major national exercise in trying to understand what is happening.
Another interesting area that you mention is the pilot that is under way with Social Security Scotland. That pilot looks particularly at whether there are examples of people claiming benefits as if they are resident in Scotland when they actually are not resident in Scotland and at any cases of people who have multiple addresses and are, therefore, putting in multiple claims. How many matches have you found through that pilot?
Public Audit Committee
“National Fraud Initiative in Scotland 2022”
Meeting date: 29 September 2022
Richard Leonard
Do you have a sense of the scale of that? Is it at the level of national entitlement card fraud in Fife, or is it much more widespread?
Public Audit Committee
“National Fraud Initiative in Scotland 2022”
Meeting date: 29 September 2022
Richard Leonard
I do not want to put words in the witnesses’ mouths but they said in answer to the initial question that was put to them on the blue badge scheme that the mortality rate among people with disabilities was higher than that in the general population. That might explain why there was a rise during the period. It is worth waiting to see what the next round of NFI results tells us about that before we jump to any conclusions.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 29 September 2022
Richard Leonard
I take you back to Sharon Dowey’s initial question on the practice of conferring with the clerks on areas that the corporate body considers that committees should scrutinise office-holders on. Did that take place in session 5—yes or no?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 29 September 2022
Richard Leonard
I will bring Willie Coffey back in later, but I will now switch to Craig Hoy.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 29 September 2022
Richard Leonard
I am not sure that the committee believes in coincidences, Mr Williams, but we are keen to be kept abreast of the progress that you are making, because that was an important recommendation in the Auditor General’s report.
Willie Coffey has another couple of questions before I turn to, last but not least, Colin Beattie.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 29 September 2022
Richard Leonard
On that constructive suggestion by the committee to our witnesses, I draw this evidence session to a close. I thank Maggie Chapman, David McGill and Huw Williams for being prepared to come to committee this morning to answer the questions that we had and respond to what has, by common consent, been a very difficult situation that has raised some pretty fundamental questions about the governance structures and whether they need to be reformed.
As I said, we are a committee that is principally concerned with outcomes and not necessarily with reviews. We will discuss our next steps, but I am sure that we will be keeping a close eye on the issue to understand how effectively any changes that you have heralded are implemented. I thank the witnesses once again for their time this morning.
10:57 Meeting continued in private until 11:40.Public Audit Committee
“National Fraud Initiative in Scotland 2022”
Meeting date: 29 September 2022
Richard Leonard
We have two items of public evidence gathering on our agenda. The first is consideration of the Auditor General for Scotland’s report, “National Fraud Initiative in Scotland 2022”.
Our witnesses from Audit Scotland, who are in the committee room, are Antony Clark, executive director, performance audit and best value, and Anne Cairns, manager, performance audit and best value. We have some questions to put to the witnesses, but, before we get to those, I ask Antony to make a short opening statement.
Public Audit Committee
“National Fraud Initiative in Scotland 2022”
Meeting date: 29 September 2022
Richard Leonard
Thanks for that helpful clarification.
You have said that the amount of fraud identified in the exercise was slightly down on that identified in 2020, which was when the exercise was last undertaken. Do you see that as a sign of success in that there is growing public awareness, or as a sign of failure in that more fraud has gone undetected?
Public Audit Committee
“National Fraud Initiative in Scotland 2022”
Meeting date: 29 September 2022
Richard Leonard
We have some more questions on that subject. Colin Beattie wants to follow up on that line of questioning.
