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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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Okay. Douglas Lumsden will ask the next question.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
In theory, everyone agrees with the national performance framework and the outcomes that it seeks to achieve, but sometimes it contradicts some of the things that people want to make public announcements on. For example, it might contradict numbers. Someone might say that, for example, we want to achieve a certain health outcome by reducing the number of beds, but when it comes to reducing the number of beds, it causes political kickback. That was touched on earlier.
I want to finish off with a couple of questions, but before I do that, I will let Jamie Halcro Johnston in because I think that he has a couple of things he wants to ask.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
We are talking about how to improve Government decision making, whereas that is more about the choice of decisions, but Paul Sheerin made those points extremely well, and it was a good question from Douglas Lumsden. I have raised that issue with the previous First Minister in the Conveners Group, as well as in many other forums, including the chamber, so I am certainly on board with what is being said.
To follow on from that and finish off our questions, I will ask how decision making relationships with ministers can be improved. We have heard about how the private sector takes decisions and, before that, we had a session about how we can improve decision making in the public sector. How can that interaction with ministers be improved?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Rebecca Rigg, would you like to add anything?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Interests
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Thank you very much.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Leadership is important there. In the private sector, people tend to have a strong knowledge of their company that they have perhaps built over many years. One of the differences in the public sector if you are a minister, for example, is that you can be minister for justice one week and minister for health the next week, if that is what the First Minister, or down south, the Prime Minister, decides to do. Ministers have to rely on the advice of civil servants, special advisers and so on. Companies come in all different shapes and sizes and sectors, but what kind of structure would a small to medium-sized company—that is, the majority of companies in Scotland—expect to have, if any?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
In politics, when the challenge function goes, that is when you know that a politician’s time is up. They get to a stage when they want to surround themselves with people who agree with them and they eventually hit the buffers. What you emphasise in relation to the challenge function is important.
Paul Sheerin, what about the dichotomy between the long term and the short term? The emphasis in politics is on five-year cycles or perhaps even shorter ones if you are a new minister who wants to make an impact. When I studied economics at university, a lot of people thought that companies were there only to make a profit, but one of the first things that we studied was the theory of the firm, which is about long-term survivability and growth rather than just making a quick buck this year and possibly next. Generally speaking, how do companies see that? Again, we know that they are different across a huge range of sectors. For example, if the economy is buoyant, how do companies decide on short-term versus long-term decision making?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
We will continue with our evidence taking on effective Scottish Government decision making. I am delighted to welcome to the meeting Paul Sheerin, chief executive officer, and Rebecca Rigg, commercial director, at Scottish Engineering; and Sandy Begbie CBE, chief executive officer at Scottish Financial Enterprise.
As members may recall, this evidence session is intended to focus not only on the witnesses’ experience of Scottish Government decision making, but also provide an opportunity to explore how their sectors approach effective decision making.
With that in mind, we will move straight to questions and I will begin by asking Paul Sheerin, how do you approach effective decision making?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Yes.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Kenneth Gibson
I thank our witnesses for coming along. The session has been very helpful and has given us another dimension to the inquiry that we are undertaking. We will continue to take evidence on effective Scottish Government decision making at future meetings.
That concludes the public part of the meeting. Our next agenda item is a discussion in private on our work programme.
12:07 Meeting continued in private until 12:14.