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 4264 contributions
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Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
John Swinney
That goes back to a point of principle about the purpose of the statute book, which is there for a variety of reasons—to codify and define the rule of law in relation to certain provisions, to provide for clarity on the law in scenarios that happen, have happened and might happen and to provide crystal-clear information to individuals and organisations about their obligations. Those are just three points about the statute book’s purpose. There are provisions in statute that relate to events and circumstances that have never happened, but they provide us with the capacity to deal with such situations should they happen.
On the logic of Mr Simpson’s argument, we should have no civil contingencies legislation, because we have not had to face a civil contingency issue. I argue that the pandemic was pretty close to a civil contingency, which provides the justification for having powers in the statute book that we might never use. If we were to face a situation when we did not have powers in place, that would get us into tricky territory.
The bill is about that fundamental issue. The fundamental issue that I disagree with Mr Simpson about is whether the statute book should be prepared for the different eventualities that might come our way.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
John Swinney
That is my justification. There might be a need for us to take action to close or restrict access to boarding school accommodation. We may have to—
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
John Swinney
The logic is quite simply that we do not want to take a policy approach in any circumstances that envisages releasing prisoners early. We have had to do that once, in May 2020. Although the Covid threat is still hanging over us, we do not think that that provision for that policy element should be available to us on an on-going basis. However, in other aspects of the bill, we must have a range of options at our disposal to help us to deal with the public health emergency. That is the simple distinction that I would make.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
John Swinney
I think that it would, because the powers that are envisaged in the bill can be used only should certain scenarios arise that are in themselves compatible with article 15. The powers are not routine or everyday, and the statute book has other powers in place that can be used only in given circumstances, which could come into the same scope as Mr Hoy outlined.
Without such powers, we would end up with a statute book that was ill prepared for certain emergency circumstances. Given what we have gone through in the past two years and the way in which we have had to address those issues in extremis, that would not be a desirable outcome.
If I think back to the passage of the coronavirus legislation in the previous parliamentary session, although there was a lot of parliamentary good will to get the legislation passed, there were quite a lot of complaints about the fact that we were not doing that in slow time. We would be better to do this carefully, in slow time, and put it into statute but make sure that it can be used only in extremis.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
John Swinney
That might be a necessity of its time. However, we do not particularly want to release prisoners out of the necessity of the time.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
John Swinney
Mr Simpson is free to lodge an amendment to that effect.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
John Swinney
We did that because of the necessity of the situation in relation to Covid, which might require us to take particular steps, as we had to do during the Covid pandemic. As a general rule of thumb, that was not envisaged as a power that was appropriate to be included in legislation of this type on a long-term basis.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
John Swinney
Essentially, we are codifying where we can do that and where we believe that we have the basis of so acting to enable us to exercise those powers.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
John Swinney
That goes back to the question whether, in principle, we are taking a consolidated route to the handling of the issues that have arisen around the pandemic or taking all those issues out element by element and putting them into the policy development work that we undertake on wider questions around housing and tenancies. I and other ministers have made the choice to put together a bill that, in essence, tries to update the statute book in light of the pandemic experience, instead of taking the compartmentalised approach.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
John Swinney
I am simply saying that the Government would not ordinarily want to have the necessity of undertaking that in an emergency.
