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 3042 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Richard Leonard
The 2030 emissions reduction target has been dropped altogether, has it not?
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Richard Leonard
You said earlier that your assessment was that we are moving away from, rather than closer to, that target.
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Richard Leonard
As we mentioned at the session’s start, you sum it up in the report, which says that it is
“impossible to understand which interventions will have the most impact on the target or deliver the best value for money.”
Until we establish that, it seems to me that it is difficult to answer the questions that the deputy convener has been putting, because you are identifying a shortage of data, an absence of meaningful evaluations and things that are not being seen through the prism of meeting the target.
I will move on now. I invite Stuart McMillan to put some questions to you.
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Richard Leonard
In the report, you say that it is
“not possible to see how the national target of 20 per cent will be achieved”,
but you also say that it is
“impossible to understand which interventions will have the most impact on the target or deliver the best value for money.”
That is quite a damning critique, is it not?
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Richard Leonard
In the report, you make the same point in relation to the evaluation of ScotRail’s experiment to remove peak fares, explicitly stating that the impact on car use of reinstating peak fares was not part of the evaluation. That is quite staggering, is it not?
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Richard Leonard
Do you want to move your questions on, Stuart?
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Richard Leonard
You have already been quite critical of the level of evaluation that has been undertaken. On equality impact assessments, one of the report’s themes is the possibility of an unequal impact, including of some of the demand management measures, which we will come to later in the meeting. Do you have a sense of whether full equality impact assessments are being done of the current transport system or of proposals for modal shift, for example? Is that part and parcel of the approach being taken by Transport Scotland and the Scottish Government?
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Richard Leonard
On that point of controversy—given that lots of disabled groups are very upset about the reduction in station ticket office opening hours—we will bring this morning’s evidence session to a close.
I thank our guests this morning: Malcolm Bell, from the Accounts Commission; Ashleigh Madjitey from the Audit Scotland office; and Cornilius Chikwama, also from Audit Scotland. In particular, I thank you, Auditor General, for your patience with some of our questions and the fullness of your responses. You have undertaken to give us a bit more information and granular detail about what makes up so-called “internationally defined domestic transport”. We look forward to seeing that and poring over in the next few weeks. Thank you very much indeed.
11:35 Meeting continued in private until 11:54.Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Richard Leonard
Many questions arise from that, but I want to move the discussion on to a related subject. I presume that, when a target such as the proposed 20 per cent reduction in car kilometres by 2030, relative to the 2019 baseline, is announced, we would expect there to be a cross-Government drive on that. What you have described does not appear to be even a cross-transport drive. Have you seen cross-Government working to meet the target that was set, which was a clear and important signal of public policy?
09:45Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Richard Leonard
You are not here to speak on behalf of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, but the report mentions that a joint governance group was supposed to be established—involving, I presume, local authority leaders and agencies and central Government leaders and agencies. Has that governance group been constituted yet?
