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 617 contributions
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Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
UK in a Changing Europe Regulatory Divergence Tracker
Meeting date: 24 February 2022
Sarah Boyack
That is very useful insight. Joël Reland, do you have any perspective on that?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
UK in a Changing Europe Regulatory Divergence Tracker
Meeting date: 24 February 2022
Sarah Boyack
That is very useful—thank you.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Sarah Boyack
I would like to ask James Hampson about the same area.
The British Council’s report “Gauging International Perceptions: Scotland and Soft Power” talks about Scotland’s soft power and points to research comparing nine significant global geographies that shows Scotland to be first in the categories of education, enterprise and digital and second in the category of culture. What more do we need to do to capture those benefits? What opportunities need to be developed for exchange opportunities not only at a higher and further education level, but at a school level?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Sarah Boyack
Those points are well made.
On the academic side, I presume that, from the point of view of research and strengthening international relationships, lecturer exchanges are also beneficial for our further and higher education systems.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Sarah Boyack
What would be the top change or top additional initiative that would help to deliver that?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Sarah Boyack
I presume that that should be done as an urgent priority.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Sarah Boyack
It was good to read both the submissions that we received. My first question is for Professor Nolan and follows up on a point that she made about a replacement for Erasmus, given its academic importance in Scotland.
I was looking at the new Welsh scheme, which Professor Nolan said will cost about £9 million. However, at the launch this week, I think that it was said that they have launched a £65 million international exchange scheme, with 15,000 participants from Wales going overseas and 10,000 participants coming to study or work in Wales. Presumably a Scottish equivalent would mean significantly more students than that. They have targeted people from non-traditional backgrounds in order to improve learning opportunities for people with additional learning needs, which looks progressive.
Will you say a bit about what you would be looking for in a future Erasmus approach, whether that is something like the Taith approach or otherwise? What would suit us in Scotland, given that academic and cultural exchange is good for our overall soft power and how our colleges and universities operate is significant for the economy?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Sarah Boyack
Okay. We will pick that up.
Do you have any comments on the post-Brexit strategy? That is a moving agenda, but has the Scottish Government articulated that, or is there a briefing that we can circulate to address the issues that witnesses have raised?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Sarah Boyack
I wanted to flag up the Danish issue because the Copenhagen office gives us an opportunity that we must seize with both hands.
In my opening question, I spoke about articulating a post-Brexit strategy, which previous witnesses have talked about. I get your point that the situation changes day by day, but there is also something about those relationships and the points that Mark Ruskell made about international relations in terms of a concordat across the UK with our partner countries in the EU. Will you talk about the need for a clear post-Brexit strategy and say how that links to the hubs that we have abroad and ways of increasing transparency about how they work?
I am not looking to be told absolutely everything, because there has to be a degree of give and take, but I would like to hear something about key priorities and the thematic approach. You talked about that in relation to international development, but I would like to hear more about it in relation to Europe as well. What are our priorities in that regard? Some witnesses said that our priorities should be tight but, of course, everyone suggests that the focus should be on the issues that they are interested in. We have heard today about the importance of education and cultural links. You mentioned economic development and trade, and the issue of climate change is also important. What is the strategy? What are the objectives under those headings, and how can they be linked to the hubs?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Sarah Boyack
It is worth checking out the discussion that we had with the first panel about educational connectivity and the new Welsh scheme that was announced this week. There are interesting lessons for us to look at.
