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 2389 contributions
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Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Culture in Communities
Meeting date: 18 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
Do you mean that that whole area—civic space, green space and interconnected spaces between communities—is about creative design?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Culture in Communities
Meeting date: 18 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
You are referring to pop-up shops, pop-up facilities and creative opportunities.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Culture in Communities
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
Yes—and the need for agency.
My last question concerns 20-minute neighbourhoods. That concept was mentioned in a number of the submissions, and it was interesting to hear about some of the work on it in England. In Scotland, it is still very much seen as a planning concept—it is in the national planning framework—but do you have examples of cultural organisations in Scotland that have actively planned around 20-minute neighbourhoods? I am thinking in particular of high streets starting to close down and people starting to rethink spaces. As major retailers shut down post Covid, they left big spaces that people are thinking about how to fill creatively.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Culture in Communities
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
I want to come back on a couple of things that have been mentioned. Jemma Neville said that we need to normalise support for cultural organisations, as we have done for sporting organisations. Have I picked that up correctly? Can I get your perspectives on what that means? When I look at how sport is supported in my community, I see arm’s-length external organisations and sport and leisure trusts doing club sport development, and I see engagement in schools to encourage young people to get into sports clubs and try out new sports.
Is there a corollary, or are culture and music different? What is missing? Your organisations are trying to provide some of that support and development on a national basis, and the TSI Scotland Network provides similar support, but what is the missing bit that would give culture and music development and support that are equivalent to what sport has?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Culture in Communities
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
Do you want to come in, Sarah?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Culture in Communities
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
[Inaudible.]—Deveron Arts previously.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Culture in Communities
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
That is great—thank you.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Culture in Communities
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
Thank you—that was useful.
Jemma Neville talked about “fluid and overlapping networks”. That brings us back to the point about how we define a cultural organisation. When I walk into organisations that might be working on climate change and transition, I see that they are full of creative people who are making things and doing incredible creative projects. Those organisations are probably not creative cultural organisations, but they are creating culture. How do we map that out? There seems to be a lot of overlap. Should we think more about a creative sector than a cultural one?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Electricity Infrastructure Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
Were particular lessons learned from the Beauly to Denny project, which took forever to get through? Landscape-scale mitigations were put in place, communities came forward to seek reductions in the wirescape in their surrounding areas and substations were moved, so some benefits flew from the project as well. Is that feeding into the current thinking? We have been here before with the Beauly to Denny project, where there were debates about undergrounding and everything else.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Electricity Infrastructure Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
Okay. I will move on to the Acorn project and the CCS cluster. I think that there is recognition in the energy strategy and just transition plan that that is needed, particularly for hard-to-abate sectors. It is not clear that there is any other pathway to decarbonise those sectors. However, there are still risks and uncertainties around the deployment of the technology, and not least the track 2 process. What would we do if we did not have Acorn? Is there an alternative pathway in respect of energy? Are there other technologies or avenues that could be explored, or are all the eggs in one basket?
