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.

Meeting date: 27 November 2024

Douglas Lumsden

I congratulate Richard Leonard on securing the debate. I do not agree with everything that he says, but I always admire the passion that he brings to the chamber and enjoy listening to his contributions.

I do not have that many childhood memories, but one of my first is the Falklands war in 1982, when I would rush home from school and watch the reports every night. The next thing that I remember after that is the miners strike in 1984. Once again, I was hooked on watching the news updates every night. Like the Falklands, that almost seemed like war to me as a 12 or 13-year-old.

One of the things that I remember most about the strike—like most people, probably like most people—is the battle of Orgreave. I remember the scenes on television with thousands of miners and probably thousands of police with their riot shields and batons banging. There were police horses charging the crowd. I remember blood running down people’s heads—I am not sure whether Arthur Scargill had blood rushing down his head at Orgreave as well—and police helmets lying everywhere. It was a scene of total chaos. Such scenes stick in your mind for ever more.

I also remember hearing about the taxi driver in Wales who had a concrete block thrown on to his taxi from the bridge. I bring that up not to demonise miners but to highlight the division that the dispute caused. I was shocked years later when a friend who grew up in Nottinghamshire told me that there were still neighbours in the streets who did not talk to each other because of the division that the dispute had caused.

As I got older, I realised that the miners were striking to save not just their jobs but their communities. That is the main reason why I want to speak tonight. I want to speak for the communities that I represent. We often hear in the Parliament that we must not do to the oil and gas industry what happened to the mining communities, but that is exactly what the Scottish National Party and Labour Governments are doing. The SNP’s presumption against oil and gas is demonising the industry and Labour’s approach to new licences is killing off the industry.

Unite the union has a campaign called no ban without a plan. Tomorrow, it is marching from Johnston Terrace down to Holyrood and speaking up for Grangemouth. It has also held demonstrations in Aberdeen. I will be there and will talk to the demonstrators because Unite is spot on: there is no plan. We are waiting for the energy strategy and just transition plan, but we have been waiting for ages. We have often been told that they need Cabinet approval, but that has gone on far too long.

We can all look back and agree that we needed to stop burning coal. We probably all agree that we need to stop burning oil and gas. However, as Richard Leonard said, we need to learn the lessons of the past and have a managed transition that protects our communities. That is why it is vital that the Government learns the lessons of the past and has a proper transition plan in place for oil and gas workers in the North Sea.

17:48