Chamber and committees

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.

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.

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Displaying 3640 contributions

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Meeting of the Parliament

Embedding Public Participation in the Work of the Parliament

Meeting date: 26 October 2023

Jackson Carlaw

I think that the committee very much feels that citizens panels that are led by Governments and people’s panels, which is what we are recommending in the Parliament, should be there to serve the debate and consideration of the elected representatives, not to act as a separate imperative for action to take place.

Interestingly, what came out of our meetings with the people who had participated in Paris and Dublin—and, indeed, here—is that the key thing is feedback. People want to have feedback. They are perfectly prepared to be told that we are not going to do something if it is explained to them why we are not going to do it. That was very instructive. Whether we like it or not, the lesson for many people who have participated in national public consultations or initiatives such as this has been that, if they have ever come up with anything awkward, the lead authority has then buried the whole thing rather than having to discuss it. The cumulative effect of that is a sort of suspicion and a cynicism about whether there was really any genuine endeavour to consider what the people who participated in the panel actually thought. Feedback is the key, but there is an understanding that it should be the national Parliament that ultimately makes key decisions.

Meeting of the Parliament

Embedding Public Participation in the Work of the Parliament

Meeting date: 26 October 2023

Jackson Carlaw

It occurs to me to suggest to the minister and maybe helpfully to Mr Doris that, although the criteria for drawing people to participate would be random, the basis of those criteria can be determined if a particular panel was going to be held on a specific issue and it was felt that that would be fundamentally important to the consideration. That would be true about some issues, but not necessarily about others. The point is that we do not want the politicians to select the individuals who would participate. There should be a genuinely random representation, but that can be an informed representation if the issues so determine.

Meeting of the Parliament

Embedding Public Participation in the Work of the Parliament

Meeting date: 26 October 2023

Jackson Carlaw

I think that I am out of time.

Meeting of the Parliament

Embedding Public Participation in the Work of the Parliament

Meeting date: 26 October 2023

Jackson Carlaw

I, too, participated in some of those Parliament days. Apparently, in a lot of the work that was done afterwards to establish what the value of those days had been seen to be, it was felt that we had kind of landed, done our thing and gone away again, and that there was no lasting benefit. It was felt that the types of engagement that we should be seeking to take from the Parliament out into communities should be designed to leave more of a legacy with regard to appreciation of the Parliament.

Meeting of the Parliament

Embedding Public Participation in the Work of the Parliament

Meeting date: 26 October 2023

Jackson Carlaw

It is interesting that, in the Irish Parliament, the Ceann Comhairle—the Speaker—has such discretion. The form of words is for the Speaker to say to the relevant minister that they have perhaps been a little let down by their civil servants in the comprehensiveness of the response that they have just given, and that they might like to add to it a little further. In fact, the existence of that power has meant that it has never had to be used, which is interesting. It is not necessarily the case that a Presiding Officer would require to intervene, but the knowledge that they could intervene has elsewhere led to sharper and more focused answers from ministers.