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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Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
There were a number of questions in there.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
Indeed.
You spoke about the First Minister’s announcements. Those policies are being developed. James Muldoon will be better at giving the detail on where we are with that at the moment, but my understanding is that it is about ensuring that the farming community has the opportunity to apply for funding that will allow farmers either to drive efficiencies or to support biodiversity and other climate mitigations.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
I take your point, but I go back to a point that I made. If we just gave you the rural support plan and told you to get on with it, and then said, “By the way, you have to do all these things,” you would say, “But those things do not tie in together,” because we would not have gone through the process that we are going through.
You say that I am proud of ARIOB. What matters is not that I am proud of it but that it works. I assure you that there are some very robust discussions happening there. It has very good representation of farmers of all sorts—from arable, pork and crofting to upland and other livestock farming. They are all in there, along with others, including the RSPB. Everyone is represented there. However, as soon as you bring such a diverse group of people into one room, things will take time, because they are not all going to agree. We were never all going to agree on everything that we are trying to get out of this.
The rural support plan is the completion of all those things. Rhoda Grant made a point about putting the cart before the horse, but I do not think that that is the case. I think we need to build what we want and then, once we have all that together, that becomes the rural support plan that will allow us to go forward into the future. It will be what it is, and if changes are required, we will be able to make them as we develop. Things will change—we have seen that. The war in Ukraine shows us that things can change very quickly—we know that.
We had to have flexibility but we also had to work with the industry. This is about more than just ARIOB. You will all be aware that I have had a letter from Donna Smith. She has come back to us—very late in the day—to say that she has a whole list of questions for us. I have written to her to say that we will answer those questions but also to ask her to come in and speak to me. I want us to sit down and have a conversation about her concerns so that we can try to find the solutions that will allow us to make progress, because the crofting community is as big a part of the conversation as anyone else. For example, I think that Donald MacKinnon has been a member of ARIOB from day 1. He has taken part in the policy development process.
I am trying to make the point that, although you talked about ARIOB being a clique, I promise you that it is not. It consists of a broad range of people with a wide range of views, who are all pitching in with ideas, advice and arguments about how to proceed. The rural support plan will be the document that comes out of all that scrutinising and all those discussions. We hope to have one of the best support plans available, which, as well as allowing us to achieve our objectives, will allow the farming community to continue to produce food.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
I did not say that it was a mess; I said that it was messy. Let us be clear about that.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
I am trying to think of the right way to phrase this. The 70:30 split is kind of where we are already. The 30 per cent is the greening element and the 70 per cent is the base payment. The decision was taken to keep within those spheres at this stage. That does not mean that they will stay that way, but that is where the split is to allow us to transition.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
To answer the first question, the 2024 act will be implemented this year. We will use both acts as we introduce new legislation. If it is a legacy matter, the 2020 act will be used; if we introduce new provisions, the 2024 act will be used. That will be the process.
Everybody recognises that coming out of the EU was a fundamental shift for all of us, because we had worked with the common agricultural policy for the period of our membership and we are now working with a completely new system. That shift has had to be made in conjunction with the industry, the sectors that are affected and the Government to allow everyone to get into the position that we are now in. We are now in a fairly positive place in that we are delivering on the objectives of the policies that the Government has set and on the farming industry’s requirements. The issue is how we will work as a community to deliver the outcomes. I hope that that answers your question.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
Are you talking about the provisions in our current work to transition from the legacy to the current position?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
At this stage, I am going to say no. We are bringing in the policy that we currently have, but I am not ruling out the potential for changes once we start to see how it functions.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
The Government will decide the way forward, but it will be based on all the information, advice and help that we are given by the industry, by non-governmental organisations and by everybody else who is part of that conversation.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
EFA is the ecological—sorry, but I have lost the term myself.
