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 MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs 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 2667 contributions
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Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 June 2023
Jim Fairlie
Professor Werritty, coming back to the point that you made, the discussion has focused very narrowly on licensing grouse moors, and clearly your report goes much wider than that. I think that you considered at some point the power to impose fines on grouse moor managers in the same way as the Scottish Environment Protection Agency would have the ability to impose fines. Was that in addition to licensing or was it a separate thing? Are they two different things, or did you think that both of them would work together?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 June 2023
Jim Fairlie
You have definitely added more questions than answers, that is for sure.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 June 2023
Jim Fairlie
Can I put one further example that has been put to me? As a former sheep farmer, I may have had the desire to shoot a white-tailed eagle because it was lifting lambs. I would be fined and possibly imprisoned, and I would face the full force of the law, whatever that happened to be, but I would not be stopped from farming sheep. If I am a grouse moor manager and I do something and the licence is removed, I am effectively stopped from carrying out my way of making a living. Would that issue fall under the ECHR?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 June 2023
Jim Fairlie
Yes. Professor Werritty, are you aware of any concerns that have been raised by stakeholders that the provisions in the bill on licensing may not be compliant with the ECHR, for example, due the potential of disproportionate interference with property rights?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 June 2023
Jim Fairlie
Let us presume that the hoops are dead easy, you just apply for the licence and you get it. I think that you were suggesting that a heavy-handed NatureScot person could impose certain restrictions. At what point does that breach ECHR?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 June 2023
Jim Fairlie
Correct me if I am wrong—I may be misinterpreting or misunderstanding you—but, if you were going to fine somebody because they had done something on the grouse moor or on the land that would be subject to a fine, you would need a burden of proof to do that.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 June 2023
Jim Fairlie
Mike Flynn has already answered my question, thank you.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 June 2023
Jim Fairlie
Could you explain what you mean by “poorly despatched”?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 June 2023
Jim Fairlie
Professor Reid, I want to come back to what you said about licensing and the figure for peat depth, whether it be 30cm, 40cm, 50cm or whatever. Among the current weaknesses of the muirburn code are that few of its provisions incur penalties and there is no robust system of monitoring and compliance. Given that we are now about to put something else in place, does the bill provide solutions to the issue of compliance? Are there robust enough penalties to ensure that that happens?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 June 2023
Jim Fairlie
To clarify, you are saying that the use of a break-back trap would take much longer than if you set up a barrier with a glue trap and a rat comes over the top of it. However, you more or less know the behaviour of a rat. I get that there will be some resistance to it, but is there not a method that you can use with a break-back trap that will catch the rat? I am trying to think of the behaviour of the rat and why it is coming out in the first place. It will come out for a particular reason, and not because you drive it out. Therefore, if it will be done quickly, somebody has to be on site to alleviate the problems that Libby Anderson has talked about. If you were using break-back traps, would you not just use more of them and make sure that they were baited appropriately?
