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 1011 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
Daniel Johnson
Jane Brumpton, I note that you want to come in, but first I have a nuanced point. The “Overview of local authority funding and support for early learning and childcare providers”, which was published in August last year, set out that there are four broad ways to arrive at costs, including surveys of both costs and prices, a working group that agrees costs for particular headings and cost modelling. When you look at how different local authorities approach the task, it looks as if, rather than striking a balance across those methods, they are picking one of them and a lot of them miss out surveying.
That is one observation. Another is that some of the survey data is quite old. It looks as if some local authorities are using data from 2016, but a lot of things have happened between then and now. Am I gleaning the right things from that? Which of those approaches do you find better or worse? Would you like to see a balance of those approaches?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Financial Memorandum for the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill (Post-legislative Scrutiny)
Meeting date: 21 June 2022
Daniel Johnson
This is my final question. I am afraid that I have been doing research while sitting in committee, because I was slightly surprised by what COSLA was saying about the number of providers. The Care Inspectorate reported in March on the state of the sector. It should be noted that the report relies on data that is about two years old, as most of the data was collected in 2019, but in broad terms it seems to say that, although capacity overall across all providers in the sector has increased, the number of services—that is, the number of providers—has declined. Given that we know what is going on in local authorities, that would seem to be painting a chilling picture for those providers that are outside local authorities. What impact do you feel that it has had? I note that this report is saying that the number of childminders has fallen by 7 per cent, but your up-to-date figures show a reduction of 25 per cent. Is that sort of level of change also reflected in the PVI sector?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Financial Memorandum for the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill (Post-legislative Scrutiny)
Meeting date: 21 June 2022
Daniel Johnson
That is the Borders, but nationally there is a decline in childminders. Matthew Sweeney, do you have any comment on that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Financial Memorandum for the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill (Post-legislative Scrutiny)
Meeting date: 21 June 2022
Daniel Johnson
Graeme, I apologise that the preponderance of my questions have gone to your colleagues.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Economic and Fiscal Forecasts, Resource Spending Review and Medium-term Financial Strategy
Meeting date: 7 June 2022
Daniel Johnson
I will leave it there.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Economic and Fiscal Forecasts, Resource Spending Review and Medium-term Financial Strategy
Meeting date: 7 June 2022
Daniel Johnson
I do not think that I was suggesting arbitrary targets or that the timeframe was 12 months. I appreciate that the timeframe is four to five years. You might not want to put a number on it, but if you are going to maintain the health service head count in broad terms, albeit with some change, and if you have that macro figure but are going to protect the half of the increase that is in the health service, other areas will have to be reduced by more than the figure than they increased by. That is an arithmetic necessity, is it not? You do not necessarily need to put a figure on it, but the head count reduction in the civil service will need to be more than the 3,800 it went up by in the Covid period.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Economic and Fiscal Forecasts, Resource Spending Review and Medium-term Financial Strategy
Meeting date: 7 June 2022
Daniel Johnson
Let me avoid the figures altogether. If the aggregate point is going to come out at 29,500 and some areas are not going to have to return to pre-Covid levels, other areas will have to go further. Is that a statement of fact?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Economic and Fiscal Forecasts, Resource Spending Review and Medium-term Financial Strategy
Meeting date: 7 June 2022
Daniel Johnson
Even if we consider spend on employability, it is really only in the past year that that has gone up by any significant amount. Therefore, you have four budget lines which—certainly in the early years—will all probably experience significant real terms cuts. Almost certainly, on aggregate across the five years, skills spending will have an aggregate cut. If you want to drive up average earnings, is that not inconsistent?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Economic and Fiscal Forecasts, Resource Spending Review and Medium-term Financial Strategy
Meeting date: 7 June 2022
Daniel Johnson
I understood that, but it is a useful clarification. I guess that the danger is that you fall into the trap of thinking that we have always had the extra consequentials and expecting to have them again in future. I take that point.
On the difference between the OBR growth forecast and the forecast growth in Scotland, I want to unpack what is contained in your forecast. We have had a change. I understand the points about holding the thresholds rather than inflating them, and about the decision at UK level to have a 19p basic rate in future years. However, if we strip those out, it appears that, since December, the commission’s forecast for earnings growth in Scotland has deteriorated. Certainly, it is clear that earnings growth in Scotland is slower than that in the rest of the UK. Can you provide any insight into what changes have occurred since December and what the likely consequences are?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Economic and Fiscal Forecasts, Resource Spending Review and Medium-term Financial Strategy
Meeting date: 7 June 2022
Daniel Johnson
Following directly on from the point about future Barnett consequentials, are you confident that the Government’s approach is sufficiently robust? It sounds almost as though it is being too granular and that there is therefore quite a large contingency in those forecast consequentials in future years. Is that the position that the commission has taken or the fear that the commission has?
