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 2297 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
“Social care briefing”
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Willie Coffey
Auditor General, your briefing also reminds us that £500 million extra was awarded to local government in 2019-20. The big question is: do you know how much of that funding was used for social care commissioning purposes—or did it find its way elsewhere?
Public Audit Committee
“Social care briefing”
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Willie Coffey
I turn to issues to do with the commissioning of services. Your briefing tells us that we tend to
“focus on cost, rather than quality or outcomes”.
That is despite spending £5 billion on the overall service. Is there a case for getting in those who are involved in the commissioning process at an early stage so that the tension between cost and outcomes could, to some degree, be avoided?
Public Audit Committee
“Social care briefing”
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Willie Coffey
Okay. My final question was going to be about the competition issue that the Auditor General raised, but I think that he has adequately covered that. If there is a more collaborative approach and people are involved at an earlier stage, we might gain more and, rather than focusing on costs, we might focus on quality.
I will hand back to the convener and allow other members to come in.
Public Audit Committee
“Social care briefing”
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Willie Coffey
Good morning. Before I ask about workforce issues, Auditor General, can you say something about how the briefing complements, reflects, mirrors or does otherwise in respect of the Feeley report that was published about a year ago? How much does the briefing find itself in harmony with that report’s recommendations, and what progress has been made?
Public Audit Committee
“Social care briefing”
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Willie Coffey
That kind of leads into my next question. Last year, we had an evidence session on Scotland’s colleges. In it, the principal of Edinburgh College set out some of the more innovative approaches that the college is taking to address the increasing demand for a social care workforce. They include enabling students who are studying social-care related disciplines to undertake a mixture of studies, skills development and work-based opportunities, and provision of dual qualifications in childcare and social care. Is such thinking being considered across Scotland? If so, is it having a positive impact?
Public Audit Committee
“Social care briefing”
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Willie Coffey
I turn to the workforce issues that are mentioned in your briefing, which tells us about the difficult environment in which the paid social care workforce operates. It also refers to the increasing demand for social care, which is coupled with a wide range of recruitment and retention challenges. What has the Government been doing and what is it doing to respond to that challenge and to ensure that we increase the number of people with social care skills?
Public Audit Committee
“Social care briefing”
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Willie Coffey
Your briefing also refers to the commitment that the Scottish Government has made to pay adult social care staff the real living wage. We are talking about wages and money now. However, that wage might still not be enough to attract people to the sector. What do you say to that?
There are also issues with career progression. people should not go in at entry level and be there for ever more; we need to think about career progression and opportunities to improve not only pay but career prospects.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Scottish Social Housing Charter
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Willie Coffey
Good morning to the minister and his colleagues. I have a few questions on how the Scottish housing quality standard intersects with the charter. Paragraph 4.1 of the charter states that landlords are “accountable” for the work that they do and the performance that they deliver. How, at ground level, are tenants able to hold landlords to account if they are unhappy with that performance? Is it through things such as tenant satisfaction surveys?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Scottish Social Housing Charter
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Willie Coffey
Should there be a direct route that any tenant who has had such an experience can take? I know that they can go and see their local councillors and talk to their MSP, or even to their member of Parliament if they want to. Nevertheless, should there be a more direct route to the regulator in instances such as the one that I described?
A related question is whether social landlords, when they allocate a property or a tenancy, give the tenant a copy of what the standard should be, so that there is almost a contract, or an agreement, between the landlord and the tenant about the condition and quality of the house that they are being offered. That is not currently done. Do you think that it might be worth considering?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Scottish Social Housing Charter
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Willie Coffey
You have mentioned a few times the possibility of a regulator coming in to cover the private rented sector. Do you see that merging into a unified charter, or will we continue to have two charters and two sets of applicable standards?
You and I both know that the difference in quality between social housing and some private rented sector housing is stark. Often, I find tenants coming to me from the private rented sector who are fairly shocked by the quality of the housing that they are living in. There are no applicable standards that they can discern; there is no capital programme of upgrades and maintenance for them to look forward to. Can you say a wee bit about that and about how we might want to bring the two sectors a bit closer together?
