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 1535 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform Programme
Meeting date: 23 May 2023
Ross Greer
Grand.
On better evaluation, whose role should that be? To go back to the convener’s original line of questioning, should reform take place within each public body or should it be led from the centre with some elements of evaluation, or is it more appropriate to have it take place externally through independent review? If we are trying to coalesce and take a consistent strategic direction in evaluation, collection of good-quality data and so on, who should lead that? Should we leave it up to each body or local authority to evaluate its service provision, or should evaluation be centralised and delivered in a consistent manner?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform Programme
Meeting date: 23 May 2023
Ross Greer
Thanks very much.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform Programme
Meeting date: 23 May 2023
Ross Greer
John Connolly should feel free to comment on anything that I have asked about. I am conscious of time, but I am interested to hear your thoughts on the balance between quality, consultation and co-design in a reform process, and on how swiftly we will be able to deliver reform. We are often simultaneously met with complaints that there has not been enough consultation and co-design and complaints that the speed of reform in Scotland is glacial. In fact, the word “glacial” is used in the Reform Scotland paper. There is clearly tension between those two things. Good-quality consultation and co-design, particularly in relation to the sustainability of our public finances, takes longer. However, we do not have as long as we might want. How might we balance those competing demands?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Universities and Colleges Funding 2023-24
Meeting date: 17 May 2023
Ross Greer
The college’s principal earns a salary that is far in excess of the First Minister’s.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Universities and Colleges Funding 2023-24
Meeting date: 17 May 2023
Ross Greer
I will stick to that and write later to the minister about the outrageous salary of the principal of City of Glasgow College.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Universities and Colleges Funding 2023-24
Meeting date: 17 May 2023
Ross Greer
Students at the University of St Andrews and the University of Stirling face 8 and 9 per cent hikes in their university accommodation rent at the same time as the reserves of the University of St Andrews have increased by £4 million—from £376 million to £380 million. Is it justified for universities to raise rents in their accommodation when they are banking money?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Universities and Colleges Funding 2023-24
Meeting date: 17 May 2023
Ross Greer
I will follow up the issues about City of Glasgow College. Like colleagues, I have met union representatives from the college, who believe that, at the same time as the compulsory redundancies are taking place, new management positions are being created. If well-paid senior management positions came into being at the same time as lower-paid support and front-line teaching and lecturing staff were losing their jobs, would that concern you?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Universities and Colleges Funding 2023-24
Meeting date: 17 May 2023
Ross Greer
I think that Mark Ruskell has contacted you. Thank you for that.
On the wider point about reserves, I agree that universities should maintain sufficient reserves for operating costs and that not all reserves are in cash, but the University of Edinburgh’s reserves have gone up by £36 million to £2.5 billion, which is far in excess of six months’ operating costs. You are right that not all of that is cash, but a significant proportion of it is.
Has the Government analysed the reserves that Scottish universities hold and does it have a policy position on that? There is an issue for the public finances. It is right that we give our universities a very large amount of money each year. Some universities use that to be a going concern, but others are banking almost £40 million a year and now have reserves that are about four times what the Scottish Government can legally hold in its reserve at any given time.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 16 May 2023
Ross Greer
I will drill down on that a little bit. I will try to be brief. Would the outcomes be better if the Scottish Government was doing less, but doing each of those initiatives with more resources available to it? At the moment, there is a huge number of priorities spread across a range of initiatives, and we know that there is a gap between ambition and outcome. Would the outcomes across the board, particularly in relation to child poverty and net zero, be better if there were fewer but better resourced programmes?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Administration in the Scottish Government
Meeting date: 16 May 2023
Ross Greer
On the point about the underspend, I am interested in whether the Government thinks that there is a presentation issue, because the single biggest chunk of the underspend related to variation in the student loan market—not a pot of cash that went unspent. We regularly have stakeholders engage with us who are frustrated that their priority did not get the spending that they believe that it deserves, and they see reports that £2 billion was not spent. Is there a basic presentational issue with regard to the terminology when we talk about underspend?
