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 1619 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of the Scottish Prison Service”
Meeting date: 14 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Right. So we will leave it as is and hope and pray that there is a replacement—
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of the Scottish Prison Service”
Meeting date: 14 March 2024
Jamie Greene
I just want to direct the conversation back to where we started—that is, the situation going forward. As you will be aware, the head of the Scottish Prison Service, Teresa Medhurst, was on television recently, and, referring to prisoners, she was quoted as saying:
“enough is enough ... We cannot take any more.”
Given that we are, as I think it is widely acknowledged, already over capacity, if the trend continues and prisoner numbers rise, the big question is what happens then. I guess that my question, therefore, is this: what do we do when there is simply no more space?
Presumably there are three things that we can do. First, we direct the judiciary not to send people to prison; secondly, we release people who are currently in prison early; and thirdly—and this is something that I suspect is being actively considered—we house the additional influx of people in temporary accommodation. Given your lengthy and wide-ranging experience of prisons, what would be the best option for policy makers?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of the Scottish Prison Service”
Meeting date: 14 March 2024
Jamie Greene
It seems that we in Scotland have been rather slow to deal with the evolution of criminology in things such as sobriety tagging and GPS technology. Do you understand that an element of society, including some of the victims organisations that often deal with legislators, feels some unease at some of those suggestions? For example, there is unease about emergency legislation that releases people from prison early, because it feels as though justice has not been served. There is also unease about directing the judiciary as to what it should and should not do and who can and cannot go to prison. How should legislators balance that unease among victims and the wider public, who might fear for their safety, with the perilous situation in prisons? Is it at tipping point?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of the Scottish Prison Service”
Meeting date: 14 March 2024
Jamie Greene
I can tell.
Public Audit Committee
National Strategy for Economic Transformation
Meeting date: 14 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Of course, much of that comes from the top down. In the first section of your briefing, you immediately identify—I do not want to put words in your mouth—a lack of political leadership overseeing much of the strategy as being an issue. You specifically identify that the
“Economic Leadership Group has not yet been established.”
The strategy was published two years ago. Are you surprised about that?
Public Audit Committee
National Strategy for Economic Transformation
Meeting date: 14 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Indeed.
Public Audit Committee
National Strategy for Economic Transformation
Meeting date: 14 March 2024
Jamie Greene
It does. Thank you.
Public Audit Committee
“Investing in Scotland’s infrastructure”
Meeting date: 7 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Have you been able to—or have you had to—quantify the financial effect of the Bute house agreement commitments on previous capital commitments? In other words, have you been able to calculate the cost of meeting different objectives—inclusive growth, wellbeing or other net zero objectives—that did not exist when the projects were initially costed? Have you been able to calculate the cost of those changes in government?
Public Audit Committee
“Investing in Scotland’s infrastructure”
Meeting date: 7 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Before I go on to maintenance, I want to give Mr Morrison the chance to say something. I am sure that he did not want to get out of bed early for nothing.
I have a specific question, Mr Morrison. I believe that you are in charge of health infrastructure investment. Will you give us some comfort that the remaining six of the promised 11 national treatment centres will go ahead? The briefing paper from Audit Scotland sheds some doubt on whether that is the case.
Public Audit Committee
“Investing in Scotland’s infrastructure”
Meeting date: 7 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Based on what we have just heard, there is no estate replacement strategy. It is all on pause. You have accumulated an immense backlog and you have talked at great length about the 2024-25 budget. It is absolutely right to look at what we have in the purse at the moment, but backlogs, by their nature, are an accumulation of underinvestment over a substantial period—a decade or more in some cases. Is it the case that we simply did not fix the roof while the sun was shining, which has left us in the precarious position of having billions of pounds’ worth of backlogs from which we might never recover?
