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 1210 contributions
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Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
New Petitions
Meeting date: 22 September 2021
Paul Sweeney
While I agree with the Scottish Government’s broad intent, it might be useful to identify areas where there is good practical application of such teaching in schools. It could be useful to identify and share that with the broader education bodies. There are pockets of very good teaching in schools. There is a particular school in Easterhouse that is doing a project called nae straw at aw. The whole school is engaged in it, and it is an incredibly inspirational exercise.
There are examples in Scotland where some really good work is being done. Perhaps those should be identified, and we should try to transplant the ideas behind what the schools concerned are doing more widely. I was not convinced from its submission that the Government is as enthusiastic about doing that as it might be.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Minister for Parliamentary Business
Meeting date: 14 September 2021
Paul Sweeney
Nice to see you, minister. We are trying to get a feel for what our workload will be so that we can anticipate as best as we can the number of future SSIs in relation to non-Covid aspects of legislation. How will the Scottish Government prioritise non-Covid SSIs to ensure that the necessary SSIs are lodged and scrutinised by the Parliament in a timely manner?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Minister for Parliamentary Business
Meeting date: 14 September 2021
Paul Sweeney
That would be appreciated. Your predecessor tended to write to the subject committees at regular intervals to highlight the volume of SSIs that could be anticipated to fall within a six to 12-month period. Do you intend to continue that practice?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Minister for Parliamentary Business
Meeting date: 14 September 2021
Paul Sweeney
Okay. Another aspect of the dynamic that we consider is packages and groupings of SSIs in relation to bills that have been passed. Significant legislation has been passed in recent years, such as the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018 and the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019, which have a significant number of delegated powers because they are complex acts. In order for this committee and the relevant subject committees to plan workload, it would be useful to be given advance notice of SSIs. Do you know whether there are any sets of SSIs in the pipeline for landmark pieces of legislation such as those two acts? Can you keep us updated on progress on them?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Minister for Parliamentary Business
Meeting date: 14 September 2021
Paul Sweeney
Okay. Thank you. Just on that, I mentioned two acts and you mentioned others for which delegated powers have now been drawn down, but the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018 and the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019 are particularly significant acts. Can you give a commitment that you will go back to your civil servants and ask them to consider when the SSIs for those acts might be introduced and write to the committee to indicate when that is likely to happen?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Minister for Parliamentary Business
Meeting date: 14 September 2021
Paul Sweeney
Minister, I am keen to bring you back to the correspondence from Charles Garland from the Scottish Law Commission. We had an interesting meeting with the gentleman, particularly in relation to the 27 pieces of draft legislation that are shovel-ready, as it were. Would it be possible for you to commission a review of those 27 items and assess whether there are opportunities for the Government to introduce some of them in a timely manner?
The committee mentioned that those pieces of legislation could be sponsored by members through the non-Government bills unit, as members’ bills. That could be an alternative route.
There is a national interest in having that body of work carried forward as quickly as possible. It might be useful to carry out an assessment of the archive of material to see what opportunities there are. It would be useful if that could be set out in writing to the committee so that we could see the Government’s view on those 27 items.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 8 September 2021
Paul Sweeney
The issue has been raised in debates in other Parliaments, particularly in relation to myalgic encephalomyelitis. Lyme disease is a contributory factor to the long-term chronic illness that is defined as ME. It might be of interest to better understand the interaction between the research on the two subjects, because the disease is another condition that people often feel is not taken seriously by the medical profession. That might be worth considering, as part of our consideration of the petition.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 8 September 2021
Paul Sweeney
I agree that the current planning framework is not well defined enough in respect of ancient woodlands, and it could benefit from being enhanced, as proposed by the petitioners, to turn ancient woodlands into what are in effect enforced wilderness. As that would be beneficial from a policy perspective, there is a legitimate basis to keeping the petition open.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 8 September 2021
Paul Sweeney
I thank everyone for their enlightening submissions. In particular, I note that the budget for the project has already been approved by Transport Scotland. I would like to know whether that is a general provision or whether the detailed specification is locked in, by which I mean: is the budget conditional on there being an automatic dependent surveillance broadcast system, or could there be a primary and secondary radar system?
I note that the Prospect trade union held a strike at the end of July, which escalated matters. It would be worth finding out what the latest situation is in that regard. We could find out whether the workforce and their representatives would be willing to make a submission on the issue.
Those are the key things that it would be good to know at this point.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 8 September 2021
Paul Sweeney
The concerns raised by the petitioners are incredibly important and colleagues’ submissions today have been enlightening. I am curious about the role of NHS health boards in those areas and how accountable they actually are. That is the elephant in the room here, is it not? They are meant to be the democratic voice of stakeholders in those regions, but it is clear that they are not performing that role effectively, given that this issue is now arising from groups that have been formed more organically underneath that structure. Consideration needs to be given to how effective health boards are in representing the interests of their areas. Should the committee write to ask the health boards how they can respond to the concerns raised by the petitioners and how they can redesign their services to respond to the issues raised by the petitioners?
How transparent are the appointments to those health boards? Is there an election process that is well known about? Should they not be considered to be as important as local council elections, for example, with regard to developing representation? That is therefore an element to consider: how democratic and accountable are health boards? They are quite opaque.
