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 2963 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Financial Memorandum for the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill (Post-legislative Scrutiny)
Meeting date: 21 June 2022
John Mason
There could be a 5 per cent administration or management charge for all the extra work in the evenings. Would you be looking for that kind of thing?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Financial Memorandum for the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill (Post-legislative Scrutiny)
Meeting date: 21 June 2022
John Mason
You are not sure whether that point was raised in 2013.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Financial Memorandum for the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill (Post-legislative Scrutiny)
Meeting date: 21 June 2022
John Mason
You mentioned capital funding. Did your sector get a share of the capital funding that was available?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Financial Memorandum for the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill (Post-legislative Scrutiny)
Meeting date: 21 June 2022
John Mason
I might come back to that in a minute.
I am interested in the point that I raised with the previous witnesses about the cost of different models. I stand to be corrected, but I assume that there is not a lot of difference in costs between the private, voluntary and independent sector and councils that provide nurseries. You have already said that the ratios for childminding are different. The ratios are lower—in other words, there are fewer kids per adult—in childminding settings than they are in nursery settings, but you would not have the same building and you would not have a manager, an office worker and so on. How do you see the actual costs panning out?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Financial Memorandum for the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill (Post-legislative Scrutiny)
Meeting date: 21 June 2022
John Mason
On this particular one, do you think that we—or someone—could have done it better?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Financial Memorandum for the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill (Post-legislative Scrutiny)
Meeting date: 21 June 2022
John Mason
I want to move on to childminding. We will hear from the Scottish Childminding Association later on, but its written submission gives the impression that it feels that councils have a conflict of interests, that they are biased towards their own services and that childminders get the bits around the edges. Is that a fair claim?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Financial Memorandum for the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill (Post-legislative Scrutiny)
Meeting date: 21 June 2022
John Mason
One of the points that Audit Scotland made was about how the outcome of family wellbeing would be measured. In the questioning so far, the committee has largely focused on the costs, the inputs and some of the outputs, but we are also meant to be looking at the bigger outcomes. Do you have any thoughts on that? Is family wellbeing measured? Can it be measured?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Town Centres and Retail
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
John Mason
Yes.
On the quite wider question of costs, the committee picked up a number of issues on the visits that we made to city centres. For example, parking costs tend to be higher in the city centre than they are out of town, which is an advantage for businesses out of town, and an older building is likely to have more maintenance issues than a newer building in a shopping centre out of town. The cost of closing a street was mentioned in Hamilton, I think: if the local shops want to put on an event—special Saturday—they have to pay the council to close the street. The message was that they are facing a lot of extra costs by being in the city centre or town centre. Is there anything that we can do about that or is it just up to local councils?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Town Centres and Retail
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
John Mason
Obviously, if people live in the town centre, that is great and there are no transport costs. However, there is another cost if someone does not live in a particular town and is working, visiting or going out for a meal there and the public transport stops fairly early, as they will have to pay for a taxi home or something like that. Is transport part of the means to revive town centres?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Town Centres and Retail
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
John Mason
To continue on the finance theme, Colin Beattie asked you about a possible revamp of non-domestic rates. It is great that the committee has gone out to visit a number of sites, and I have picked up from some of the notes on that that quite a lot of retail businesses would prefer it if non-domestic rates were linked to turnover rather than to the value of the property. One of their concerns was that if they improve their property, the non-domestic rates go up automatically, which is a problem for them. Is that something that could be considered?
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