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 3519 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “How the Scottish Government is set to deliver climate change goals”
Meeting date: 18 May 2023
Richard Leonard
There is a sense—I picked this up from your report and the Scottish Government’s just transition commission’s recommendations—that there is a degree of impatience that the climate emergency was declared back in 2019, but, in 2023, some fairly basic building blocks are still not in place in a way that we would perhaps expect.
One of the things that struck me—this picks up on Sally Thompson’s comments—is exhibit 3 in the report, which refers to what you describe as “by exception” reporting being in place between key Government groups. In other words, there is no routine, systematic or regular collaboration in that sense. I am not saying that that happens by chance, but it does not routinely happen. Do you have any comments on that?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “How the Scottish Government is set to deliver climate change goals”
Meeting date: 18 May 2023
Richard Leonard
On a similar theme, you draw attention in the report to the deputy director network, which you describe as a
“key climate change governance body”.
It seems to operate informally, so I again ask the basic question: does that network produce minutes?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “How the Scottish Government is set to deliver climate change goals”
Meeting date: 18 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Thank you. I will move things along now and invite Craig Hoy to put some questions to you.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “How the Scottish Government is set to deliver climate change goals”
Meeting date: 18 May 2023
Richard Leonard
I will continue with the theme of risk management in the final series of questions that we want to put you. Towards the end of the report, we read a reference to an exercise that took place in summer of 2022 inside the net zero directorate, which took part in what you describe as a risk housekeeping exercise. The result of that housekeeping exercise was the conclusion that the net zero directorate demonstrated a maturity level of novice to organised. My understanding is that that means that the directorate had only just started to implement processes that were in line with Scottish Government guidelines. It was at a very early stage—a novice stage—in that regard.
Do you have a concern about that, given that this is the directorate that is supposed to be showing leadership and driving forward this agenda across the whole of Government?
Public Audit Committee
Decision on Taking Business in Private
Meeting date: 18 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Good morning. I welcome everyone to the 15th meeting in 2023 of the Public Audit Committee. The first agenda item is for the committee to consider whether to take agenda items 3, 4, 5 and 6 in private. Is that agreed?
Members indicated agreement.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “How the Scottish Government is set to deliver climate change goals”
Meeting date: 18 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Thank you very much. We now move to another area that has been highlighted in the report and which Willie Coffey has some questions on.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “How the Scottish Government is set to deliver climate change goals”
Meeting date: 18 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Okay.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “How the Scottish Government is set to deliver climate change goals”
Meeting date: 18 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Okay; thank you.
Obviously, the committee will have to consider whether it would be useful for us to invite officials from DG net zero to give evidence to us. If we decided to do that, we could put to them directly some of the questions that have arisen from our session with you.
I thank the Auditor General very much for the evidence that he has led this morning, and I thank Rebecca Seidel and Sally Thompson for the very useful evidence that they have contributed.
For the record, I should have mentioned at the start that Colin Beattie has submitted his apologies for not being at today’s meeting. I wanted to have that recorded.
I close the public part of the meeting and move us into private session.
10:08 Meeting continued in private until 11:03.Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “How the Scottish Government is set to deliver climate change goals”
Meeting date: 18 May 2023
Richard Leonard
The principal item on this morning’s agenda is for us to consider an important report, which the Auditor General published in April. The report relates to audit work that was conducted up until March, so it is very up to date in both data and analysis, and looks into how the Scottish Government is set to deliver climate change goals.
I welcome our witnesses. Stephen Boyle is the Auditor General for Scotland. Alongside him are Rebecca Seidel and Sally Thompson, both of whom are senior managers at Audit Scotland.
As usual, we have quite a wide range of questions to put to you, but before we get into them, I ask the Auditor General to give us an opening statement.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “How the Scottish Government is set to deliver climate change goals”
Meeting date: 18 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Okay. Obviously, part of our role as a parliamentary committee with an interest in this area is to hold Government to account and it might be that we will consider taking up what you have just told us.
Another thing struck me in relation to the point about transparency. Does the GCE programme board publish minutes, for example? Does it have minutes? If so, are they in the public domain?
