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 2881 contributions
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Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Interests
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
John Mason
I do not think I have anything relevant to declare.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
John Mason
My colleagues will probably have more questions, but that was helpful. It certainly helped me to understand a bit better what is going on.
I turn to Dr Simpson. It seems to be a complicated landscape, and we have just heard that one of the bodies has a pretty wide remit anyway. Do we need all these bodies? Are all their remits clear? You can obviously speak for your own organisation.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Kinship Care
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
John Mason
Kinship carers might need other support as well as financial support. The committee has received evidence that some kinship carers are nervous that barriers might be raised by their local authority and that they might not be able to keep the children. Housing is an obvious issue—for example, an elderly couple who do not have a large house could suddenly have their grandchildren living with them. Can you say anything about how we deal with that?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Kinship Care
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
John Mason
I accept that a lot of it is down to the local authority, and I hope that a reasonable approach would be taken, but some local authority officials take a very legalistic approach—for example, if a house was technically overcrowded, they would not move on that. I hope that your words are reassuring and will encourage people, but there is still genuine fear.
I will broaden things out a bit. What other support is there? Children preferably not moving schools is important, but kinship carers might be further away. Can you say anything about that?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
John Mason
I am new to the committee, so this is a completely new subject to me. My questions might be a little simplistic, but I hope that that will help others who are also less familiar with the subject.
As I understand it, we currently have several bodies. We have the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council, the Scottish Commission on Social Security and the disability and carer benefit expert advisory group, and we are now talking about establishing the Scottish employment injuries advisory council.
I will start with Dr Rushton. Can you give a brief summary of how all those bodies relate to each other and how that would change if we had this new body?
10:00Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
John Mason
Okay—that has clarified that.
Just to follow up on the convener’s point about reserves, I fully agree that we should use reserves and not leave money sitting. Will doing that put more pressure on future budgets, because it will be something that we cannot do again?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
John Mason
If we take Creative Scotland and Forestry and Land Scotland as examples, they are able to top up their budget from reserves at the moment. In future, however, you would either have to trim their budget or find more money from elsewhere to put back in.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
John Mason
The Scotland reserve, at the start of 2022-23, was approximately £699 million. All of that was then put into the budget but, at the end of the year, there was still £244 million put back into the reserve. Does it make any difference if we take everything out of the reserve and put some back in or if we instead take out just the net amount at the end of the year? Are those simply just different ways of doing things?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
John Mason
Okay, that is fair enough. The point has been made that the Ukraine resettlement costs have been higher in the current year than we had perhaps anticipated. Are those costs completely open-ended? In other words, is there still uncertainty?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
John Mason
Does that mean that, instead of there being a specific Ukraine cost in future, a bit more will be spent, for example, on housing, schools and the NHS?
