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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Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
New Petitions
Meeting date: 6 September 2023
Jackson Carlaw
The petition will remain open and we will write to the various organisations suggested.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 6 September 2023
Jackson Carlaw
Yes, it might be risky to be sequential here; let us get it all in there now.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 6 September 2023
Jackson Carlaw
I thought that you were going to say, “As somebody who uses public toilets”. [Laughter.]
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 6 September 2023
Jackson Carlaw
I think that Mr Torrance’s conclusion, as supported by Mr Ewing, was that it does not look as though the Government will change its view on the statutory matter.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Interests
Meeting date: 6 September 2023
Jackson Carlaw
That is the most interesting declaration that I have heard in a very long while. Thank you for that.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 6 September 2023
Jackson Carlaw
The first of the continuing petitions is PE1905, which was lodged by Angela Rosina Cousins on behalf of UK XJW’s Support. The petition calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to order a public inquiry into the actions that have taken by religious organisations in response to child sex abuse allegations since 1950.
Since our last consideration of the petition, we have written to the Scottish Government, highlighting the recommendations of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse in England and Wales. As part of that communication, we again called for the Scottish inquiry to have its terms of reference extended or for the Scottish Government to investigate the possibility of establishing an alternative inquiry in order to match the scope of the inquiries that are taking place elsewhere.
We have since received a response from the then Deputy First Minister, John Swinney, restating the Scottish Government’s position that widening the inquiry’s remit is not practicable, as it would make the inquiry “unmanageable in scope”. The response states that it is imperative that resources are dedicated to on-going work to implement the national guidance for child protection.
Do colleagues have any comments or thoughts in the light of the former Deputy First Minister’s latest response?
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
New Petitions
Meeting date: 6 September 2023
Jackson Carlaw
Colleagues, are we content to support those suggestions?
Members indicated agreement.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
New Petitions
Meeting date: 6 September 2023
Jackson Carlaw
Thank you. I think that you are quite right—the Government lit the fuse of expectation without giving us the bang of delivery on an issue on which the public expected progress.
Do colleagues have any suggestions?
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 6 September 2023
Jackson Carlaw
That brings us to our second continued petition, and I gather that the petitioner is again with us in the public gallery. Good morning.
PE1911, lodged by Ann Stark, is on review of the Human Tissue (Scotland) Act 2006 as it relates to post mortems. The petition calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to review the 2006 act and relevant guidance to ensure that all post mortems can be carried out only with permission of the next of kin;?do not routinely remove brains; and?offer tissues and samples to next of kin as a matter of course.
In our consideration of this petition, we are joined by our colleague Monica Lennon MSP. Good morning to you, too, Monica.
Members will recall our evidence-taking session in June with the Lord Advocate and Andy Shanks, Head of the Scottish fatalities investigation unit at the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. Since that meeting, we have received further information from the COPFS; its written submission states that the COPFS is working with pathology providers on a service redesign, and its preference is to have a national pathology and mortuary service established under national health service leadership. On the issue of CT scanning, the submission notes that representations have been made by two pathology providers on the viability of using scanning in post-mortem examinations, which?I think is progress on what we have understood to be the position before.
The petitioner, Ann Stark, has provided two written submissions, the first of which notes the upcoming service redesign and states that there is an opportunity to introduce the use of scanners in murder and suspicious cases. Ann also emphasises the importance of taking grieving families’ perspectives into account if a national service is to be established.
In her second submission, Ann Stark reiterates the importance of families having a choice about what happens with their loved ones and highlights the use of scanners in London to check for prostate cancer, which I think was in a very recent news story—in fact, they were talking about using magnetic resonance imaging for that.
In addition to the two submissions that are included in the papers, we have all received numerous e-mail communications directly from the petitioner about issues relating to her petition. I say to the petitioner that, although I fully understand her desire to ensure that we are fully informed, it is most helpful if submissions go to the clerks, because it causes confusion among members if we get them, as we are not sure of the operational process for dealing with them. I assure the petitioner that, if they go to the clerk, we will get them on a concise form, and that would assist us.
Before I open up to wider comment, given that Monica Lennon was with us when we heard our evidence from the Lord Advocate and from Andy Shanks, I wonder whether she would like to say something.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 6 September 2023
Jackson Carlaw
No—that was incredibly helpful.
In the letter that Fergus Ewing has suggested, it might be helpful to refer to the fact that the COPFS has said that it has received representations from two pathology providers. It might be interesting to ask for a bit more detail on that, because that does not tell us anything other than that it has received submissions. It would be useful to pull that together, as Fergus Ewing has suggested.
Do colleagues have any other suggestions over and above that?
