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
Town Centres and Retail
Meeting date: 4 May 2022
Colin Beattie
Nothing at all?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Town Centres and Retail
Meeting date: 4 May 2022
Colin Beattie
You might have heard our discussion with the previous witnesses on collaboration in developing digital services. There seemed to be different views—I would not call it a disagreement—about whether such training existed in any adequate form or whether, in my words, things were a bit disjointed and sparse. Is there a role for Scotland’s universities and colleges in boosting and developing digital services with Scotland’s retail businesses? What role would the enterprise agencies play in that respect, given that you already have a training function? In asking that, I am referring back to our previous witnesses’ comments that they did not recognise much of what you were doing.
That question is for Hugh Lightbody.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Town Centres and Retail
Meeting date: 4 May 2022
Colin Beattie
Stuart Mackinnon, assuming that you agree with Peter Mowforth’s statement that there is no collaboration at the moment, is there any way that collaboration could be put in place? What would that look like and how practical is it to expect practitioners to take time out from their business to train people who are coming up?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Town Centres and Retail
Meeting date: 4 May 2022
Colin Beattie
How joined up are they?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Town Centres and Retail
Meeting date: 4 May 2022
Colin Beattie
The impression that I got from how you described the various initiatives was that they did not seem to be terribly joined up; they seemed to be individual initiatives that have been launched for good reasons, but if you are looking across the piece at retail businesses and the offerings from colleges and universities, it does not sound very strong.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Town Centres and Retail
Meeting date: 4 May 2022
Colin Beattie
Carolyn, my final question is for you.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of NHS Highland”
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Colin Beattie
Can you briefly indicate what actions the board has taken to review and refine the board risk assurance framework? That question might be for Pamela Dudek or for the chair.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “New vessels for the Clyde and Hebrides: Arrangements to deliver vessels 801 and 802”
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Colin Beattie
My focus, which is on two areas, is partly based on some of the comments that you made last week. Some of my questions probably relate to points that fellow members have raised, but I would like to get the sequence right in my mind because it is a bit complicated.
CMAL awarded the contract to build the ferries—it was the body that signed that off. There was no ministerial direction to do so—jump in if I am telling porkies; I am trying to get it right—so there would be no piece of paper for that. Is that correct?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “New vessels for the Clyde and Hebrides: Arrangements to deliver vessels 801 and 802”
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Colin Beattie
On the face of it, I would agree. However, as you have said, there is ambiguity. As I said, if I was a Scottish minister receiving the covering email, I would just have looked at the bit that said
“broadly comparable with the tender specification”
and so on, and said, “Right. They seem to have done their job.” However, that is probably for a different discussion.
On FMEL, one of the concerns that I raised last week was about the destination of the money and what has happened to it. We can speculate that the £45 million, which was really for working capital, paying salaries and keeping the yard ticking over, was used for that purpose. However, tens of millions of pounds went into the yard and there is no evidence that, at the point of nationalisation, work or equipment of that value was lying there. What happened to it?
You have said that, because FMEL was a private company, Audit Scotland has been unable to carry out proper due diligence. Now that it has been nationalised, do we own that history? Can we look retrospectively at what happened to the money? There must be some record of it some place.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “New vessels for the Clyde and Hebrides: Arrangements to deliver vessels 801 and 802”
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Colin Beattie
It seems to me that there was an awful lot of evidence in the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee report. I would have hoped that that might have led you down that road without waiting for the Public Audit Committee.
