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 2559 contributions
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Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
John Mason
That is kind of expected and acceptable.
For the coming five years in your corporate plan, are you budgeting to make a particular surplus? Is there a target? Is the target just to break even?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
John Mason
I accept that in a time of normal inflation it is quite nice to keep your fees low—although it has to be said that train fares, Mars bars and most things go up every year, and not just once every 10 years. With inflation at 10 per cent or so, do you need to rethink that model and consider an annual increase?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
John Mason
I have a few questions about finance: Is it the case that your annual accounts and financial accounts will be out fairly soon?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
John Mason
Are you not going to tell us how much?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
John Mason
So, although you do not have the surplus, at least it is there, in one sense, with the Government.
Assuming you are making surpluses, the staff reductions we have just been talking about are not particularly driven by a need to increase the surplus or reduce your costs. Is it linked more to the amount of work that you have to do?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
John Mason
We are in a period of quite high inflation—it is around 10 per cent at the moment, as I understand it. What is your position on fees? Will you increase fees by 10 per cent next time round and increase wages by 10 per cent, or is it not as simple as that?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
John Mason
Other members will be asking about new cases and arrears and so on in more detail, so I will not go there. Have you asked your users whether they would, for example, prefer a greater fee increase and less in arrears, or a lower fee increase and keeping arrears?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
John Mason
I am new to the committee, so I do not know what that was.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
John Mason
I think that I am right in saying that when the financial set-up for ROS changed, there was an accumulated surplus that was handed over to the Government. On the whole, you have delivered surpluses; you have not delivered deficits.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
John Mason
Do you negotiate your own pay increases for staff, or is that part of the public sector negotiations?
