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 1001 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Daniel Johnson
I have one final question. Consistency in approach is one thing that needs to be examined. You have all discussed challenge, but I wonder whether it is being conceived of and captured in the right way. In our discussions with officials, it struck me that, when we asked them about it, they pointed towards the use of external people on programme boards. That sounded to me very much like challenge at a policy level rather than necessarily challenge at the level of granular assumptions.
That is certainly the case in comparison with my experience of the commercial world, where you build in challenge at that more granular level in order to ensure that the assumptions are correct, because, ultimately, that is what ensures that you have a robust business case. Is that a fair reflection? Is that backed up by your experience of looking at those situations in detail?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Daniel Johnson
Thank you very much. I had better leave it there.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Daniel Johnson
I will leave it there for now.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Daniel Johnson
Professor Cairney, your last statement neatly summed up the subject that I am circling around. Your paper is really interesting and excellent, but I wonder whether the bit that I am interested in is actually the next tier down.
I was struck by the fact that everyone in the group that I was in framed every decision as being either policy driven or financially driven. My experience of effective organisations is that the really important bit is what happens in between. To my mind, policy, in a business context, is about strategy and overall direction, while what are critical are the frameworks for delivery and implementation. I had hoped that there would be some examination of the decision making beneath all that. In other words, once the policy has been set, framed and determined, how and by whom are decisions captured and structured at the next level down? After all, that is very often where policy fails.
10:15Am I barking up the wrong tree, or is there something in that? Does that area need to be better defined? It seems that people out there want to talk about policy and finances and civil servants want to talk about policy and finances. Is there an issue around a lack of definition and clarity about those day-to-day management decisions?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Daniel Johnson
To my mind, it is not necessarily about specialism; it is about who is responsible at what stage. There is a point at which we are all very clear about the framing of policy and its outcomes. Ultimately, the minister stands up in Parliament. That is relatively clear, but it is about the individual bits.
We are all trying to avoid specific examples, but there was a significant contract variation in the ferries contract that was documented by an email chain. That stands out as being not right—that is not how things would happen in a well-functioning private sector organisation. In the financial services sector, you would find yourself butting up against all sorts of regulatory rules if you did that.
The issue is perhaps more about how policy is monitored, but is there also a point about roles? There was an interesting bit in our discussion about accountable officers. Is how the civil service captures who is managing the in-flight policy based on role rather than structure or process? Is that an area that we need to probe at more?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Effective Scottish Government Decision Making
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Daniel Johnson
And some of them are quite rusty.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Daniel Johnson
It is on page 6. The figure is 18,075.2, whereas when I look up the budget bill as passed, at legislation.gov.uk, I see that the figure there is 18,039. Ensuring that we are using accurate figures is important and I am trying to understand why there would be a difference.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Daniel Johnson
Is that the reason for the discrepancy? The heading states:
“Resources other than ... as shown in the Budget Act”.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Daniel Johnson
As the convener pointed out, there are a lot of numbers. However, the bottom line, and what people want to know, is whether more or less money is being spent. For example, on regional health boards, has the amount of money that they were budgeted gone up or down compared with what was in the original level 4 figures when we passed the budget bill last year?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Daniel Johnson
Yes, and it is about the bottom line in terms of impact. Bluntly, if we are having to ask these questions, I think that members of the public might have even more questions than we do.
I am going through the gross funding changes, and one that will be of particular concern to a number of people is the additional funding that is being made available to Ferguson Marine for the completion of hulls 801 and 802. There was speculation in the press before Christmas that the total sum to be spent on the two vessels might rise to £350 million. How much money will be spent in this budget year on the vessels, and how much money has been spent to date across all budget years?
