Official Report: search what was said in Parliament

Chamber and committees

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.

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.

Meeting date: 14 March 2024

Jamie Greene

Indeed. I am sure that we could have a whole session on whether public services are fit for purpose once people are released, and another one on rehabilitation and what we are doing right or not doing right in Scotland.

My final point is a grave one: deaths in custody. Across prisons and other forms of custody, it is estimated that there are around four deaths per week. Those are not solely in prisons, of course, but a worryingly large number of people are dying in the different levels of the prison estate. Is that part of your watching brief? Do you have any views on that, or have you performed any analysis of why those numbers are so high? Have you made any recommendations to the Prison Service or to ministers on how that number can be reduced?

Public Audit Committee

Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of the Scottish Prison Service”

Meeting date: 14 March 2024

Jamie Greene

No, I commend you for the work that you have done. However, clearly, all that work will be made more difficult with an increasing population, an antiquated estate and the lack of resource and assistance.

Public Audit Committee

National Strategy for Economic Transformation

Meeting date: 14 March 2024

Jamie Greene

Good morning. I will start with the basics. From your briefing, it seems that Scotland has two issues: sluggish growth in gross domestic product, and low productivity. Is that assertion correct?

Public Audit Committee

National Strategy for Economic Transformation

Meeting date: 14 March 2024

Jamie Greene

That reflects the complexity of our respective roles in this area: on the one hand, using public money and Government intervention in certain areas in which the Government chooses to do so; and, on the other, using that as leverage to improve the wider economic outlook in the private sector, in which small and medium-sized businesses, for example, are part of the solution.

I want to touch on the very short mention that is made, on page 14 of your briefing, of the new deal for business that the Scottish Government has touted. Would you say that it is facing a bit of an uphill struggle with that? Last year, independent analysis by commentators such as the Fraser of Allander Institute predicted a less than favourable outlook for that relationship. By August of last year, the Fraser of Allander Institute was saying that only 9 per cent of Scottish businesses believed that the Government understood the business environment that they worked in. In certain sectors, such as hospitality, construction and professional services, there was a huge differential. Between 50 and 90 per cent of businesses there believed that the Scottish Government did not understand their environment.

That is the backdrop that the Government is up against, and that is the uphill struggle that it faces. It is very early to tell, but is there any evidence that the new deal for business is working or has been reset?

Public Audit Committee

Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of the Scottish Prison Service”

Meeting date: 14 March 2024

Jamie Greene

Good morning. I think that other members will probably want to talk about the prison transport issue later in the session, but I want to kick off this morning by looking at the bigger picture with regard to the prison population, capacity within the prison estate, and the state of the estate itself.

The forecast for March 2024 was that the prison population would rise to more than 8,000. I presume that that has occurred. It is my understanding that, even running at maximum capacity and at so-called extended operating capacity, we can accommodate no more than about 8,500 prisoners across the entire estate, so we are getting to a crunch point. Given your overarching brief, what is your view of the situation at the moment? How perilous is it?

Public Audit Committee

Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of the Scottish Prison Service”

Meeting date: 14 March 2024

Jamie Greene

It is important that we put on record our thanks to those on the front line who deal with and manage this. It sounds like a real balancing act in some of those institutions.

That said, we have made legislative changes over the past decade. The presumption against short sentences of incarceration means that, by the very nature of our system, those who get sent to prison have been convicted of quite serious crimes. How can we achieve that balance? Do we reduce the prison population, as has been suggested, or is the answer to simply build more estate? We have not been building or replacing those antiquated buildings in a timeous fashion, and any attempts to do so have, as we know, gone massively over budget and been hugely delayed.

Chamber and committees