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
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
I am interested to hear you say that, because it relates to my next, and probably final, point. I took the opportunity to look at the accounts of the University of Glasgow, which is where I studied. As at last July, its unrestricted reserves were £766 million and its total reserves were more than £1 billion. That is more than the Scottish Government is allowed to have in reserves, let alone what it actually has, and it is more than the university’s total annual income. I accept that the University of Glasgow might be one of the richer universities, but when it is sitting on so much money, how can you plead that we are not paying enough per student?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
Another theme that has been highlighted, certainly by COSLA but also by other people, is multiyear funding and having a bit more funding certainty over five years, say, to start with. The idea came from not just COSLA but the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, much of whose funding comes from local government and from whom we will be hearing later.
How would more certainty in that area make a difference? I am attracted to the multiyear model, but it makes things a bit inflexible. If Glasgow City Council awarded money to a local group or charity for five years and halfway through that period it was found that the group was not performing, there would not be not much room to change the situation. Do you have thoughts on that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
You mentioned that the share of the total budget that local government gets has fallen from 34 per cent to 28 per cent. Would you and your colleagues argue that we should choose a figure—perhaps 34 per cent—and fix it permanently as the local government share?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
So maybe we should target our support more towards the other universities?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
But, by your argument, surely we should pay more for a student at Glasgow Caledonian University than we do for a student at the University of Glasgow, for example?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
I might return to that point. I was interested in Daniel Johnson’s questions about what people think of the voluntary sector, because it covers an incredibly wide range of things. At one end, you represent what I would call the small charities that are wholly staffed by volunteers and get no public money; you also represent big organisations—Quarriers and so on—that get a lot of public money. Have some of the organisations in the sector become too dependent on public money? Presumably, they started off relying on donations, mainly.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
Multiyear funding, which we addressed in the previous evidence session, too, is an issue at every point in the process—the UK Government gives money to the Scottish Government; the Scottish Government gives money to local government; and local government gives money to voluntary organisations.
If, say, Glasgow City Council could not guarantee a particular charity 100 per cent funding for the next five years but could guarantee 80 per cent funding, that would give some certainty to the organisation, which could then flex, depending on what else it could get. Would that be an acceptable compromise?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
Are you okay with that, Ms Rowand?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
One point that has come up many times—in fact, you have mentioned it yourself—is the concept of bringing in new policies and looking at what is already happening. Given that it looks like we will be fairly tight for money over the next few years, would you go so far as to say that the Scottish Government and local government should not make any new commitments or policies and should focus instead on what they are doing at the moment and try to do it as well as they can? Should we pull back on new initiatives?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
John Mason
Eileen Rowand, all political parties make promises at elections—both at council level and at a national level—and we all want to do new things. Do you think we should cut back on the new things?
