Chamber and committees

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.

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.

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Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)

Tributes to Her Late Majesty the Queen

Meeting date: 20 September 2022

Paul O'Kane

In the past few days, it has been hard not to be moved by the words written in the book of Ecclesiastes:

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted ...
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance”.

Even if we do not have faith, the poetry of that speaks to the collective experience of the past days, as people across our communities have sought to respond to the death of the longest-serving monarch in our nation’s history, and as a family has mourned a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.

Across West Scotland, constituents have cried and laughed as they shared their memories of the Queen and her many visits in the cause of the service to which she pledged herself at such a young age, and which she carried out faithfully until just 11 days ago. Whether she was launching ships on the Clyde at Port Glasgow, opening the Tannahill community centre in Paisley or visiting factories in Irvine, people remember where they were, each word of the conversation that they had and, of course, how they felt when they met her in their own towns and villages.

The Queen was the great constant in our ever-changing world, giving a sense of certainty in a world that is all too often uncertain, and enduring with people and places in good times and bad. I was struck, when listening to the service of thanksgiving from Belfast cathedral last week, when the Archbishop of Armagh, John McDowell, said that there were two people whose deaths we could never imagine: our own and the Queen’s. That blend of constancy and touching of so many lives is why her loss has been so keenly felt, even by people who have no connection to, or belief in, a constitutional monarchy. There has been a real sense of an era ending.

In that Belfast service, we were also able to reflect on the Queen’s commitment to peace and reconciliation. Her leadership in letting go of the past, no matter how painful, and in acknowledging difference and using symbols and language as a way of showing respect and understanding, have helped to make the unthinkable become reality. As someone who shares British and Irish citizenship, I thank her for that. We all still have much to learn about the power of rooting ourselves in forgiveness, patience and reconciliation.

Yesterday, many people felt as though a door closed. Who could help but feel that sense of finality, as the haunting pipes faded beyond the doors of the abbey or St George’s chapel? Like King Solomon in Ecclesiastes, we know that there is a season and a time for everything.