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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Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 30 September 2021
Richard Leonard
Thank you. I will conclude the morning’s session by picking up on that last area of discussion. We cannot pre-empt the cabinet secretary either, but we can reflect on the data in and the recommendations made by the Audit Scotland report earlier this year. One of the things that struck me about its analysis was that it said that, although real-terms spending on education increased by 0.7 per cent between 2013-14 and 2018-19, the increase was not reflected in all councils. In fact, it went on to say that there was a drop in real-terms funding for education in the attainment challenge councils, with the exception of Glasgow City Council. Most people would think that the attainment challenge fund was additional money to help those local authorities that have the biggest challenges in closing the attainment gap. Can you give us an explanation of why that was?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 30 September 2021
Richard Leonard
Thank you. I am sure that if those local authority voices were around the table today, they would say that their settlements have also been reduced in the past 10 years and that that might be one of the reasons why overall spending has not gone up in the predicted way.
Thank you very much indeed for your evidence this morning, Mr Griffin. We very much appreciate the time that you have given up and the information that you have shared with us. I think that there were a couple of points on which you mentioned you might be able to provide us with some further detail, and that would certainly be helpful. We will await the cabinet secretary’s announcement. Will that be before or after the recess?
Public Audit Committee
“Community justice: Sustainable alternatives to custody”
Meeting date: 30 September 2021
Richard Leonard
Thank you very much. We will now go back to the agenda.
I thank Stephen Boyle for joining us once again, and we are pleased to welcome by videolink Antony Clark, who is interim director of performance audit and best value at Audit Scotland, and Nichola Williams, who is a senior auditor at Audit Scotland. Once again, Willie Coffey, who is of our own, is joining us by videolink.
I ask the Auditor General to give us a brief introductory statement. We would then like to ask questions about the community justice report.
Public Audit Committee
“Community justice: Sustainable alternatives to custody”
Meeting date: 30 September 2021
Richard Leonard
The extent of the current pressure on the capacity of Scotland’s prisons is a matter of public policy concern. Based on your analysis, do you have any sense of the reduction or change in the balance of those figures that would address that concern? You have reported on the state of the Scottish Prison Service before. Do you have a view about the extent to which the balance needs to be tilted from custodial to community sentences to relieve the pressure in the prison service?
Public Audit Committee
“Community justice: Sustainable alternatives to custody”
Meeting date: 30 September 2021
Richard Leonard
At the start, you mentioned the high incarceration rates in Scotland compared with those in other parts of western Europe. In your report, you say that around 5 per cent of the overall justice budget is spent on community-based sentences. What is the international picture, and what does the situation in Scotland look like in comparison with other countries that have much lower rates of imprisonment of people who have committed crimes?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 30 September 2021
Richard Leonard
Thank you. If, at any point, you want to bring in Graeme Logan or Gayle Gorman, please feel free to do so.
You mentioned the OECD—we will come on to ask some questions about its report shortly. You also spoke about the extent of data collection. One of the other rather pointed conclusions in Audit Scotland’s report is in paragraph 25, which bluntly says:
“The Scottish Government’s national aim is to improve outcomes for all, but it has not set out by how much or by when.”
As well as collecting more data, do you plan to address that charge in the report?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 30 September 2021
Richard Leonard
But the Government has targets on, for example, child poverty and fuel poverty. Therefore, has any consideration been given to setting targets on reducing the attainment gap and putting a timescale next to it?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 30 September 2021
Richard Leonard
Thank you. Colin Beattie has a series of questions.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 30 September 2021
Richard Leonard
We might come back to funding and the extent to which it is additional. You mentioned the OECD report. Sharon Dowey has some questions about that.
