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 875 contributions
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Economy and Fair Work Committee
Consumer Scotland
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Daniel Johnson
The 2020 act that created Consumer Scotland gave it three broad primary functions: providing advice and information to policy makers on consumer issues; carrying out research and investigations into consumer issues; and providing or securing the provision of advice and information to consumers.
You have a budget of £3.9 million to spend, but only £444,000 is spent on direct consumer advice. My question has two parts. First, why did you choose to go down the route of outsourcing consumer advice rather than doing it directly? Secondly, given that it is one of your primary functions—indeed, many of your answers have emphasised your view that you are a consumer advocate—I wonder how you view the fact that only 11.4 per cent of your budget is dedicated to direct consumer advice. Is that the right balance, and are you placing the right emphasis on direct consumer contact?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Petroineos Grangemouth
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Daniel Johnson
Thank you very much.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Convener
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Daniel Johnson
After a great deal of deliberation, I would like to nominate Colin Smyth.
Colin Smyth was chosen as convener.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Consumer Scotland
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Daniel Johnson
I have one final cheeky question. If we had those organisations round the table today, would they say that you have had a positive impact on the consumer advice landscape?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Petroineos Grangemouth
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Daniel Johnson
Finally, I have what is almost a comment—it is certainly a very closed question. The prospect of growing sugar beet or trees to provide feedstock for biorefining has been raised, but we would need to take a very close look at that if it was how we were proposing to use the land. If we were to use it for that purpose, we would not be using it for other purposes—say, for food. Indeed, if we were using it to grow trees as feedstock, it would mean that we would not be using it for wood product, and I would argue that, with wood products, the carbon would be locked away without any refining being needed.
I guess that the implication of that is that the Government needs to make a very clear and hard-nosed assessment about land use and whether that sort of thing constitutes appropriate use of the land. Would that summary be correct?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Consumer Scotland
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Daniel Johnson
I will push you a little bit on that. All of us round this table are familiar with how advocacy works; indeed, we undertake it day in and day out. I would find it quite difficult to do that job if I did not hold surgeries with my constituents to understand what they needed. In a functional sense, how can you understand what to advocate for on consumers’ behalf if you are not doing that sort of thing directly? In conducting broad research, as it were, is there a danger that everyone ends up as a statistic rather than a person, and that you miss some of the more fundamental issues that you would have picked up if you had that direct contact?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Consumer Scotland
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Daniel Johnson
I understand. There are lots of different ways in which one can understand the consumer experience.
That brings me to my final question. Part of my reason for asking this is that I completely recognise that Citizens Advice Scotland does a great job, but its funding is under severe pressure. Because of those funding pressures, it is not the organisation that it might once have been or might hope to be.
Just reflecting on my constituency casework, I note that I am getting an increasing number of people approaching me because they are struggling to get good consumer advice to understand what their contractual obligations are with providers of goods or services, when procuring things or buying products directly from shops or online and, in particular, with the building trade. My view is that the availability of direct consumer advice is much weaker than it was perhaps a decade or two ago. What is your view of that and of your role in helping to rebuild the advice ecosystem or landscape?
10:15Economy and Fair Work Committee
Petroineos Grangemouth
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Daniel Johnson
We have all been looking at Grangemouth in a renewed level of detail. It occurs to me that some quite broad-brush assumptions are made, not all of which are correct. We think, “The oil comes out of the North Sea, it all goes to Grangemouth and we get our petrol—job done.” I read that, although the Forties pipeline terminates at Grangemouth, only 40 per cent of your feedstock comes from the North Sea. Our briefing notes also indicate that you are the main supplier of aviation fuel to Scottish airports and that you supply some 70 per cent of Scotland’s petrol stations.
Will you provide a bit of detail as to what proportion of your feedstock is coming from the North Sea? Critically, as refining stops, will that introduce additional costs to customers who are downstream? In other words, will aviation fuel cost more or less than previously? Will there be any consequences for consumers at the fuel pumps in Scotland as refining at Grangemouth ceases?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Petroineos Grangemouth
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Daniel Johnson
No. I like to make sure that my questions are energy dense.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Interests
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Daniel Johnson
Thank you for that very warm welcome. I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests, where I declare that I am a director of a company with retail interests in Edinburgh.
