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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Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework: Ambitions into Action
Meeting date: 24 May 2022
John Mason
In your paper, you say that bodies are self-selecting outcomes. Can you expand on that, and do you think that that should change?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework: Ambitions into Action
Meeting date: 24 May 2022
John Mason
I want to continue for a minute on the idea, which I get, that local outcomes should be valid for national outcomes. We have a problem in that the third sector tends to come to us and say, “If it is happening in Grampian, it should be happening in Strathclyde,” or whatever. That is especially true in health—I realise that you folk are not focused on that—so, if there is a specialist nurse for something in NHS Tayside, we hear that there should be a specialist nurse in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. How do we square that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework: Ambitions into Action
Meeting date: 24 May 2022
John Mason
Thank you. I want to move on to something else. One or two people have said to us that the public does not get excited about the national performance framework, which is pretty obvious. Is that important? Linked to that is the suggestion that we rename it to something such as the national wellbeing framework. Do you have any thoughts on that? Would renaming it and putting “wellbeing” in make a difference?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework: Ambitions into Action
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
John Mason
That ties in quite well with the question that I was going to ask next, which is about the budget—I think that Ms Wallace mentioned the budget. Government officials have commented that they do not see the national performance framework being used in the budget process. Are you saying that that is not necessarily a bad thing, or should the national performance framework and the budget be a bit more closely tied together?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework: Ambitions into Action
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
John Mason
I want to follow up on some of those points. My first question is about how important language is. At our workshops on the NPF, we spoke to various people. When we spoke to Government officials, they talked about how the language was intangible for outsiders. When we spoke to people from Citizens Advice Scotland, they said that, although the language differed—they said that the language that they used was different from the language of the national outcomes—they felt that there was broad alignment.
Dr French, in your submission, you make the point that we should rebrand the national performance framework as Scotland’s national wellbeing framework. How important is it that we get the wording right? Should we change some of the wording?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework: Ambitions into Action
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
John Mason
I will come to Ms Wallace in a moment, but I want to pursue this. I feel that we do not talk about the national performance framework very much. MSPs are briefed on it, but I do not hear it being mentioned specifically in the chamber or in committees. Is the experience in Wales and elsewhere that people will use frameworks more if the words are better?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework: Ambitions into Action
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
John Mason
However, the Parliament tends to question how many people have got highers, how many people have got degrees, how many people are at college—those very fixed things—rather than asking, “How’s the wellbeing going?”
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework: Ambitions into Action
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
John Mason
We could explore that for longer, but I will leave that to the convener.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework: Ambitions into Action
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
John Mason
We will work on that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body Budget (Website)
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
John Mason
I am convinced that you are trying to keep costs down and not spend. There is a balance to be found between preventative maintenance and a reactive approach.
I stress that it is important that this committee understands that a project is going to take longer, because in effect the committee is pre-approving what would normally be a year-by-year budget.
