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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Public Audit Committee
“Planning for Skills”
Meeting date: 10 March 2022
Richard Leonard
The Audit Scotland report talks about the failure to build any relationship in the shared endeavour between the Scottish Funding Council and Skills Development Scotland. In fact, in its report, Audit Scotland said that there were “tensions between the agencies”. That has gone on for at least four years between, let us remind ourselves, two major Government-funded organisations. I think that the joint budget for the two is £2 billion of public money a year; yet, because of tensions between the organisations, there has been a failure to deliver. Can you explain that?
Public Audit Committee
“Planning for Skills”
Meeting date: 10 March 2022
Richard Leonard
It runs a bit deeper than that, does it not? Those things happened over a period of years during which you have not always been the director general responsible; I respect that. However, the criticisms by Audit Scotland go as far as to say that there was a complete absence of strategic intent or a performance management framework to make progress. Why on earth were those fundamental elements not put in place?
Public Audit Committee
“Planning for Skills”
Meeting date: 10 March 2022
Richard Leonard
Certainly—I will bring you back in a bit later on.
Director general, can I return us to the Audit Scotland report? Weak governance is one of the glaring failings that is highlighted in the report. Paragraph 24 talks about a proposal to alter the framework from there being a joint SFC and SDS skills committee to the creation of an Enterprise and Skills Strategic Board skills committee. However, the report tells us that
“this did not happen because of the statutory requirement for the existing committee to be chaired by a SFC board member. No alternative governance structure was introduced at ESSB level, and the joint SFC and SDS Skills Committee has not met since August 2017. The SFC consolidated the Joint Skills Committee with another of its committees, which has since become the SFC’s Skills, Access, Enhancement and Learning Committee. SDS does not sit on this committee.”
Can you tell us why the ESSB did not seek to set up an alternative governance structure, and why the Scottish Government presided over such a situation?
Public Audit Committee
“Planning for Skills”
Meeting date: 10 March 2022
Richard Leonard
The Auditor General was asked about that during the 10 February evidence session. He said:
“The pandemic is one factor, but it is not the sole factor. I draw the committee’s attention to exhibit 3 in the report, in which we track the chain of events dating back to 2016 and 2017”.—[Official Report, Public Audit Committee, 10 February 2022; c 12.]
Again, I make the point that we can accept that there will be errors from time to time, but there seems to be consistent error and failure to deliver in the alignment of skills. I have not even spoken about the appointment of a permanent skills alignment director, which was a pivotal role that was never properly filled.
Public Audit Committee
“Planning for Skills”
Meeting date: 10 March 2022
Richard Leonard
Thank you very much. That concludes our questions for this session. I think I said at the start that it was a section 22 report. It was a section 23 report, but contained some trenchant criticism nonetheless. Sharon Dowey referred to the fact that this is apprenticeship week and there have been numerous references to last week’s publication of the national strategy for economic transformation, which said:
“A skilled population is fundamental to business productivity and economic prosperity.”
For those reasons it is important that we get these things right and we do not preside over some pretty fundamental—“systematic” is a word that has been used wisely this morning—failures.
The only other point I would make is that we will of course have an opportunity to look at the shared outcomes framework document in due course, and we shall do that. I am quite sure that the Auditor General will want to have a look at it as well. We will do that and we may well come back to you with further questions, Mr Griffin. That leads me to my final point: if we had known about the timing of this important document, which is absolutely central to the discussions that we have had this morning, we could have rescheduled this evidence session so that we could have taken full account of it. I hope that that is one of the things that you and your team will think about after leaving this meeting.
I will draw the public part of the meeting to a close and thank the director general for his evidence. I also thank Helena Gray and Adam Reid, and Helen Webster, who joined us online.
10:12 Meeting continued in private until 11:16.Public Audit Committee
“Planning for Skills”
Meeting date: 10 March 2022
Richard Leonard
I will now invite Craig Hoy to ask questions.
Public Audit Committee
“Planning for Skills”
Meeting date: 10 March 2022
Richard Leonard
Is there a reason why it was so late?
Public Audit Committee
“Planning for Skills”
Meeting date: 10 March 2022
Richard Leonard
Willie Coffey has questions about monitoring and reporting arrangements.
Public Audit Committee
“Social care briefing”
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Richard Leonard
Sharon Dowey has a series of questions to put.
