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 893 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Craig Hoy
If I fly in and out of the country from Buenos Aires, you can probably monitor that and count the days much more easily than if I go between North Berwick and Berwick-upon-Tweed. How do you monitor that? Do you just take what people say at face value and take their word for it?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Craig Hoy
Thank you.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of South Lanarkshire College”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Craig Hoy
One would assume that the board is fully aware of its role and responsibilities for good governance. The board was appointed on 4 November but members were not fully inducted until the beginning of February 2022. Will you talk me through what the normal induction process would cover and what the risks are of having board members who have not been through that process?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of South Lanarkshire College”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Craig Hoy
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but given the seriousness of the issues that were at play in the college, would not it have been far better for the college to have made sure that the board was fully aware of its roles and responsibilities at that stage?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of South Lanarkshire College”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Craig Hoy
Good morning. I have some questions about the composition, roles and capabilities of the board. However, before I do that, I have a technical question.
On 30 September, the tenure of four board members ended, and the board’s membership therefore fell below the numbers that are required by statute. However, the board met on 4 November. Given that it was not statutorily competent at that point, what status did that meeting have?
09:30Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of South Lanarkshire College”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Craig Hoy
Did you ask or get any indication as to why inductions did not take place virtually?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Craig Hoy
You say that the variation is not particularly significant, so you would not have concerns, but someone in Scotland who earns £50,000 will pay £1,489.10 more in tax than someone in the rest of the UK who earns £50,000. Given that there is always compliance, evasion and avoidance, at what level of variance would you start to have significant concerns and think that you would need to probe deeper into the data?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of NHS Highland”
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Craig Hoy
With regard to retention, can you tell us briefly about the exit interviews that you carry out? When someone leaves NHS Highland, what do they typically say is their reason for leaving?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of NHS Highland”
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Craig Hoy
That is critical, and the issue appears to be common to other health boards, too. If we are having a recruitment and retention crisis, it is vital that we capture the reasons for people leaving the profession.
What efforts are you putting into the creation of a more sustainable workforce model and dealing with the fact that you are competing all the time with other areas of Scotland that might not have the same rurality or cost of living issues? What more could the Scottish Government and NHS Scotland do to support health boards such as NHS Highland that cannot compete equally with boards in other parts of the country?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “New vessels for the Clyde and Hebrides: Arrangements to deliver vessels 801 and 802”
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Craig Hoy
Thank you convener, and good morning Mr Boyle. Last week, Mr Boyle, you expressed your frustration that you cannot get to the full facts and the heart of the ferrygate scandal. We are barely a week into our inquiries and I think that some members already share that frustration. Key documents cannot be found or were not prepared. Key witnesses have been gagged. There are reports of possible fraud and corruption. Scotland’s former First Minister has gone as far as saying that we should be calling in the cops. Today, Erik Østergaard, the chairman of the Government’s ferries quango when the deal was done, has said that CMAL was given written confirmation to proceed with awarding the contract to Ferguson Marine, but it was not given any written confirmation of why that was the case. As with all scandals, there is perhaps now some whiff of a cover-up, with people and possibly even Government ministers covering their tracks. We are only one week into our inquiries, and I do share your sense of frustration.
However, we are not alone. Jim McColl, who we should not forget was once a pal of the Scottish National Party—he had the First Minister on speed dial and was one of the Government’s favourite Scottish businessmen—is clearly frustrated; his submission to the committee is stark and points to more than just a fallout among friends in the nationalist movement. He says that the procurement process was driven by a party-political dynamic and was rushed to deliver headlines for the SNP conference; he also says that CMAL’s concerns were not conveyed to him and that not enough time was given to the feasibility of the conceptual design. If that were the case, it would be very serious indeed. In fact, we would be talking about corruption of the procurement process and it would explain why things since then went badly wrong and why ministers potentially have been keen to cover their tracks.
In the absence of any documentary evidence to disprove all that, how concerned should we be about the original process being conducted along such lines? If Mr McColl’s claims are true, does that explain why we have seen such resistance to full and total transparency at a critical point in this process?
