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 1960 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Financial Memorandum
Meeting date: 26 September 2023
Michael Marra
When the medium-term financial strategy was published, the Scottish Parliament information centre, the Fraser of Allander Institute and the Institute for Fiscal Studies all commented that figures for the policy were missing from those projections, so whatever you are being given to spend to make the policy happen is not included in them.
It comes down to the question of what comes first. You are saying a lot about co-design and putting the right system in place, but I am not getting a sense of real confidence that we are working in a financially prudent way to think about the financial limitations. How far are such limitations informing the co-design process?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Sustainability of Scotland’s Finances
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Michael Marra
I want to get away from the stickiness side of it, although I think that that is right. However, in this scenario, we are trying to recruit somebody internationally. Are we going to prevent the NHS from being able to do that? Again, it is a key service for the poorest people in Scotland. Have you done any work on how your proposals might have an impact on those two issues?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Sustainability of Scotland’s Finances
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Michael Marra
Any colleague, but I think—
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Sustainability of Scotland’s Finances
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Michael Marra
No. Sorry.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Sustainability of Scotland’s Finances
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Michael Marra
I will take one step back to the questions that the convener was pushing on. Your response on tax rates was that, essentially, you believe that the jobs involved are sticky. There are two other issues in that. I was speaking to doctors yesterday at general practitioner surgeries in Dundee, and they were telling me that they do not have a head count problem but that nobody works five days, so they have a massive capacity problem and cannot deliver. That is a trend in the workforce anyway. Will the changes in the differential tax rate that you propose not impact on that?
The other thing that I have problems with in Dundee is attracting breast cancer oncologists. You will know that breast cancer rates for the poorest women are much, much worse than those for richer women, so this is actually about poor people. That is an internationally competitive sector, and we are finding it difficult to bring people to Scotland to do that. What modelling have you done or what consideration have you given to whether it is more likely that I will get breast cancer oncologists in Dundee to help those women if we increase those tax rates?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Sustainability of Scotland’s Finances
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Michael Marra
Would anybody else like to respond?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Sustainability of Scotland’s Finances
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Michael Marra
My final question might be more of an observation. On multiyear budgets, you mentioned political instability and the difficulty in 2016. I recall calls for multiyear budgets going back as far as 2010. Looking back, we thought that we had political stability, and the Scottish Government was not delivering multiyear budgets at that point. Is that something that is intrinsic to the political performance of the Scottish Parliament, our institutions and the relationship with local government? I recognise that instability is now the key driving factor, but there is a longer-term problem.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Sustainability of Scotland’s Finances
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Michael Marra
Even under the relatively stable longer-term budgets, the Scottish Government still did not deliver multiyear funding settlements to Scottish public services prior to 2015. It did not do that. It says in the papers that people called for it in 2013. I am challenging this, because I worry that, although political instability in the UK is the key issue right now, if we cannot deliver multiyear funding it is a big problem. Let us hope that we can do so. Is there something about the way in which this place performs that means that people are more reactive, in setting one-year budgets? I am wondering whether we will not find multiyear funding to be the solution.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Sustainability of Scotland’s Finances
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Michael Marra
Alastair, you know that I am a big supporter of the universities in Dundee, and we have had conversations regularly, but you will also be aware that we have industrial action this week at various institutions across the country. Unite and the University and College Union are out, looking for pay that is commensurate with something approaching the cost of living, frankly. How can we make sure that our universities are delivering the pay deals that we require, given that we are sitting here talking about budgets?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Sustainability of Scotland’s Finances
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Michael Marra
There definitely is not. In our previous evidence session, Professor David Heald talked about people negotiating their net pay position. In essence, he was agreeing with you that, internationally, people will look at that. Whether there is less pay because of tax or a lower basic wage is probably immaterial to somebody making that move internationally. Does that not result in the national health service having to pay substantially more to make up for the cuts and it becoming a vicious cycle where, on your logic, the public sector has to pay into the system rather than gain from it?
