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 4236 contributions
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Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
Has the United Kingdom Government engaged with the Scottish Government on any changes to expected financial support to take account of what is a colossal and unprecedented set of damaging impacts on the sustainability of a long-term capital programme?
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
With the greatest respect, that is not the question that I asked, cabinet secretary.
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
I appreciate that point, but is there also wider engagement and an understanding within Government, beyond the justice organisations, of the necessity for other solutions that could result in a reduction in the prison population, such as the availability of supported accommodation, employment and training opportunities, literacy and numeracy support, health and wellbeing support and mental health interventions? Is it recognised in Government that those things are important if we are to win the prize of reducing the amount that we are spending on incarceration—which, as you suggested in the comparison that you gave the committee, is a very substantial amount of public expenditure?
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
So is this the moment for the Government to be bold in the challenge that it puts in front of a range of organisations—all of whom have been in front of this committee asking for more money—to say that we must shift our focus, because we cannot go on like this?
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
Finally, if better outcomes are being achieved, is there an argument for money to be allocated to other purposes as a result, instead of its being argued that the money allocated to a particular organisation or policy area can be increased only because it was argued for in the pre-budget process?
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
I will move on to another aspect. I was very struck by the detail that you placed on the record a moment ago regarding your experience in your professional life of the size of the prison population and where it is now. Making a rough calculation of the financial difference in the budgetary costs of accommodating that larger number of prisoners, I estimate that it must come in at something in the order of £90 million. It strikes me that that scale of additional financial pressure to be managed by the Scottish budget creates conditions in which the Scottish Government, the judiciary, community justice services and diversionary activity services should be absolutely focused on maximising the opportunities to avoid incarceration if it is safe for that option to be taken. Are all those players engaged in that dialogue? Are they all pointing in the same direction?
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
How I would interpret your completely fair observation, Mr O’Donnell, is that the private sector is, in essence, insulated from the effect of inflation, and the public sector carries the can. The argument that those contracts represent some degree of risk transfer is complete baloney.
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
Thank you. I turn to the capital cost issue. Do you have any current experience of the real increase in capital costs in the current environment? I am probably talking about capital costs in this financial year versus what you would have expected them to be, let us say, three years ago. For example, for a particular project two years ago, you might have expected it to cost £20 million, but, in fact, it has cost £20 million plus X—are you able to furnish the committee with any live examples of that, because that would be a helpful piece of data?
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
What is the month during the year when the inflation rate for the private prison contracts is set?
Criminal Justice Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
John Swinney
Essentially, the private sector contracts were inflation proofed at the time of the agreement of the contracts. What is the risk transfer involved in that, whereby the private sector is protected from the rampant inflation that the public sector faces?
