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 2155 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
Major Capital Projects: Accountability and Governance Arrangements
Meeting date: 19 May 2022
Willie Coffey
Do we invest enough time and effort at the beginning of capital programme processes to make sure that the specification, design and cost estimate work is thorough, good, reliable, deliverable and all that? There are examples of great delivery, but there are also spectacularly bad examples. I am interested to know why we cannot spot issues early enough to stop a project becoming a bad one. Key ingredients must be wrong in certain projects. People must be familiar with all the tools at our disposal, but what are the secrets to finding out as early as we can that something will, potentially, go wrong?
Public Audit Committee
Major Capital Projects: Accountability and Governance Arrangements
Meeting date: 19 May 2022
Willie Coffey
Does that not tend to happen after the event? The thing was built and installed; it was done. Why did we not spot that there was an issue before it was done?
Public Audit Committee
Major Capital Projects: Accountability and Governance Arrangements
Meeting date: 19 May 2022
Willie Coffey
I have a final query. The principles that Lawrence Shackman described are applicable no matter what people are building. The question for us is whether those principles are being applied across the board to other sectors. I mentioned a range of things that we might build in this capital programme. If that level of depth, rigour, investment, time, effort, design and specification is replicated across the board, we stand a good chance of delivering all the stuff in the programme on time and on budget. Andrew Watson, can you give the committee an assurance that that is your understanding of the whole range of what is in front of us and what is in the programme right now? Can that depth and rigour across the board, which Lawrence described in his sector, be applied to all the capital programme, so that we can look forward to all the projects being delivered on time and on budget?
Public Audit Committee
Major Capital Projects: Accountability and Governance Arrangements
Meeting date: 19 May 2022
Willie Coffey
Good morning, everybody.
I will take Andrew Watson back to the beginning of all processes for all projects. Over many years, the committee has been focused on quality standards and their application in the design and specification part of projects. We are believers in the idea that, if you get it right at the outset, you are likely to get it right at the end. The opposite is also true: if you do not get it right at the beginning, you are unlikely to deliver anything on time and within budget.
We have mentioned a couple of examples; Lawrence Shackman mentioned the Queensferry crossing. We can see the success of the Queensferry crossing, the Borders railway and even the A77 Maybole bypass, but at the other end of the scale we see the ferries issue.
Do you insist that quality standards are in place for all projects, no matter what we are building? It could be a bridge, road, school, piece of software or ferry. Do we look specifically for the presence of such standards in the whole range of projects that are on the books? Do we require that of all such projects? It seems to me that, if we do not, we are at great risk of projects running out of kilter and over cost. Do we require quality standards at the outset?
Public Audit Committee
Major Capital Projects: Accountability and Governance Arrangements
Meeting date: 19 May 2022
Willie Coffey
I understand what you say, and I am familiar with that, but these issues keep coming to us; the Auditor General discovers them and the committee gets oversight of them. Committee members are always left wondering, “Why could we not spot these things earlier?” Is there a lack of rigour in the design phase? We heard the example of the ferries where the cables were not long enough to reach where they should have reached. Why can we not see an issue like that earlier, even in a design document, in order to avoid doing that? It tends to be the case that something happens and then we try to correct it, learn the lessons at the end and feed those back into the next process. That is great and it is the right thing to do, but I am curious about why we cannot see the issues at an early enough stage to prevent the initial errors.
Public Audit Committee
Major Capital Projects: Accountability and Governance Arrangements
Meeting date: 19 May 2022
Willie Coffey
Those are very helpful answers.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
Willie Coffey
I have a supplementary to Paul McLennan’s question about zero valuation, which we discussed last week. We think that it was based on the EWS1 standard—using external wall systems form 1—which, we discovered, disnae have any legal basis in Scotland. We think that it is not a statutory process. We were left wondering how people in Scotland can have a zero value attached to their property from a scheme that is not a regulatory standard in Scotland, and that potentially does not legally apply. Could you offer the committee any clarification on that issue?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Affordable Housing
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
Willie Coffey
Does anyone else want to come in?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Affordable Housing
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
Willie Coffey
Are we gathering that sort of data locally to pinpoint or understand what groups people are not accessing the housing market in the way they would wish? Are we examining that and feeding it to the Scottish Government and others so that we can adapt the models?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Affordable Housing
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
Willie Coffey
Roslyn Clarke and Mark Rodgers mentioned this issue, I think, but are we providing enough access to housing for, for example, young, single professional people? They are single wage earners, obviously, which affects their ability to access the different housing models. Are we doing enough on that, or do we need to do a little bit more to reach out?
