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 1489 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Colleges Regionalisation Inquiry
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Michael Marra
That is very useful, and my final question is on a related issue. The committee struggled for a little while with comparisons with the rest of the United Kingdom in this matter, and the Scottish Parliament information centre produced some information for us on that. The system in England is very different, but the nearest comparable figure for completion rates there seems to be 89 per cent. Will some means of comparison be included in the methodology that you are talking about? Do you have any reflections on why that gap, whether it is perceived or real, might be so big?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Universities
Meeting date: 28 September 2022
Michael Marra
I am keen to ask about the focus on the long term. You mentioned research capture from UKRI. The trend in that is not going in a good direction. It is going down, is it not, Professor Boyne?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Universities
Meeting date: 28 September 2022
Michael Marra
I agree with the comments about the doomsday cult at Westminster and the budget approach that the UK Government is taking, but one reason for the Scottish Government having a big gap in its funding is its failure to grow the Scottish economy, which means that there are hundreds of millions of pounds in lost tax revenue. You talked about the need for a bigger pie. How important are universities to growing the size of the Scottish economy and growing our tax receipts?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Universities
Meeting date: 28 September 2022
Michael Marra
On the pressure on social infrastructure—housing for students who have come to Aberdeen and primary school places for their children—are you planning? It does not feel to me as if those pressures are being planned for appropriately.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Universities
Meeting date: 28 September 2022
Michael Marra
We had a series of college principals in front of us last week who told us that the SFC was asking them to assume that there would be a 2 per cent uplift in pay. In their view—in everyone’s view, I think—that is deeply unrealistic; it is not happening. You are not making the same assumption about universities, are you.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Universities
Meeting date: 28 September 2022
Michael Marra
In the years ahead, we are looking at very significant real-terms cuts to university funding on the teaching and research side. Ellie Gomersall, do you have hopes or signs from your members in the NUS that the situation might improve? What level of response do we require from the Government in order to change the situation?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Universities
Meeting date: 28 September 2022
Michael Marra
It does not feel as if that balance works at the moment, given some of the evidence we have heard today. I understand that the issue does not sit on your desk, however.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Universities
Meeting date: 28 September 2022
Michael Marra
During the years I taught at universities, international students made an unbelievable contribution in the classroom, to the richness of the learning and to diversity. Frankly, as a teacher, it is a pleasure to have international students in the room, contributing to those conversations.
I worry that we are not planning. It is difficult to plan for volatile markets and the pressures that colleagues have told us about this morning around the housing market and school places for the children of students coming into the country. You tell us now that those pressures will continue to increase given the demand and the need for universities to increase the numbers. Are we planning our social infrastructure to cope with those pressures?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Universities
Meeting date: 28 September 2022
Michael Marra
It has been pushed back a month—it is not that much of an emergency, by the sounds of things.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Universities
Meeting date: 28 September 2022
Michael Marra
We hear a lot of concerning issues, and we could talk about there being almost a crisis. Karen Watt mentioned the peak challenge. The Bank of England has had to step in to bail out UK pension funds, so the situation is getting worse. In the long term, what are the prospects if we continue on the current path? That is what we have to be concerned about. In the long term, where will the current path lead us?
