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 2603 contributions
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Economy and Fair Work Committee
Business Investment
Meeting date: 21 December 2022
Colin Beattie
Stacey Dingwall, do you have a view on that? How confident is the FSB?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Business Investment
Meeting date: 21 December 2022
Colin Beattie
My concern is to get to the bottom of whether female-led enterprises need to be better skilled at making applications or whether they get turned down or rebuffed when they try to apply. I am still not sure what the answer is on that.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Business Investment
Meeting date: 21 December 2022
Colin Beattie
Thank you for that clarification. Let me move on. We were talking about which sectors of the Scottish economy are vulnerable, and obvious ones such as hospitality were mentioned. We are in a cost of living crisis that is affecting businesses across Scotland. Which sectors in the Scottish economy are being affected most by the cost of living crisis itself, by which I mean the actual increase in prices?
Fergus Mutch might want to comment on that.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Business Investment
Meeting date: 21 December 2022
Colin Beattie
Stacey Dingwall, would you like to come in?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Business Investment
Meeting date: 21 December 2022
Colin Beattie
There is doom and gloom in your survey results. How are your members responding to that? How are they reacting?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Business Investment
Meeting date: 21 December 2022
Colin Beattie
Clare Reid, do you want to comment?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 21 December 2022
Colin Beattie
I do not have a question on the particular issues that the minister has raised. However, in the previous parliamentary session, the Economy, Energy and Fair Work Committee looked at debt arrangement schemes and produced a report.
One of the key things that came out of the report was the question of independent advice before someone enters into one of those arrangements. The current arrangement does not allow for that; the financial advisers are all in-house to various interested parties.
The question of independent advice came up against a bit of a brick wall in relation to who would pay the cost. However, the committee found that many people were going into debt arrangement schemes that were possibly inappropriate and did not work for them. Will the Government therefore look at that again to see whether there is a solution to that issue?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of National Records of Scotland”
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Colin Beattie
You referred to Glasgow as an area that had a lower response rate. Are there other areas of significance where similar patterns emerged?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of National Records of Scotland”
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Colin Beattie
It improves the quality of the return, not the quantity.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of National Records of Scotland”
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Colin Beattie
I have a quick question for clarification. In paragraph 15, you indicate that 42 per cent of overall staff costs relate to temporary staff. The explanation that is given for that is that those staff are needed for the census, which must be a major part, and for specialist IT projects. I am interested in what the split is between the two.
