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 502 contributions
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Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Minister for Parliamentary Business
Meeting date: 7 February 2023
Oliver Mundell
To be fair to Mr Arthur, he has been very helpful and engaged proactively with the committee on that individual example. I just wanted to get assurance that the Government is doing its bit to ensure that stakeholders are squared off on SLC bills. I am getting that assurance from you.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Minister for Parliamentary Business
Meeting date: 7 February 2023
Oliver Mundell
I am interested in asking, first, about Scottish Law Commission bills. The committee has been scrutinising two of them recently, but there was a suggestion in the 2021 programme for government that the Government wanted to implement a number of other SLC reports in this session. Are you able to enlighten the committee on the pipeline and timescale for the introduction of those bills and how the Government goes about prioritising the different reports?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Minister for Parliamentary Business
Meeting date: 7 February 2023
Oliver Mundell
I am going to move on to touch briefly on the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill, on which the committee has just reported to the lead committee. I do not want to get into the politics of or a spat on the bill itself. I am more interested in hearing the Government’s thinking on the concept of bringing to the Parliament framework bills that contain a large number of delegated powers. In this specific example, and as a former member of the committee, you can understand the challenge that the committee is faced with when a delegated powers memorandum cannot specifically say how the delegated powers would be used. Do you recognise that challenge?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Minister for Parliamentary Business
Meeting date: 7 February 2023
Oliver Mundell
Do you, as the Minister for Parliamentary Business, feel that framework bills that rely heavily on secondary legislation give the Parliament as a whole enough opportunity to be part of a co-design process? Why should that process prevent the inclusion of more detail in primary legislation? We did not really get to the bottom of that.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Minister for Parliamentary Business
Meeting date: 7 February 2023
Oliver Mundell
To push you a wee bit harder, do you have a target for this session to get through the backlog? The bills are usually highly technical. They come to the committee because, although they are not necessarily easy pieces of legislation, they are not politically contentious.
We have picked up a little bit of frustration from the SLC that there are a number of well-thought-out suggestions for how to improve law. We also heard from stakeholders how the Moveable Transactions (Scotland) Bill would make a big difference to how they go about their daily business. It is easy for SLC bills to fall down the Government’s and Parliament’s priority lists, because there are other things that are politically more exciting. I am trying to get a commitment from you that the SLC’s proposals are being considered seriously and that the committee will be kept busy in future.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Instruments subject to Affirmative Procedure
Meeting date: 24 January 2023
Oliver Mundell
In relation to the second instrument, on short-term lets, I want to put it on record that, although I will support it and I recognise that the six-month extension will make a big difference to a number of individuals, it will not solve all the problems. The need for the instrument could have been avoided if concerns that were raised by the Short Term Accommodation Association and other industry stakeholders had been taken into account when the licensing scheme was first proposed. I therefore think that the delays and challenges that we are now seeing were entirely predictable, and that the Scottish Government needs to refocus its efforts on rebuilding relationships with stakeholders.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Redress Scheme
Meeting date: 12 January 2023
Oliver Mundell
A number of people got an increased payment after their application was looked at again, and maybe that number of people is a bit higher than you would have hoped for or expected, so I guess that my question is, were you are satisfied with that? I know that it is a new scheme and that this is a sensitive issue, but it struck me that that number was a wee bit higher than you might have hoped.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Redress Scheme
Meeting date: 12 January 2023
Oliver Mundell
I appreciate that.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Redress Scheme
Meeting date: 12 January 2023
Oliver Mundell
That speaks to Mr Doris’s earlier point. I am aware that some applications that were sent in very soon after the scheme opened have still not moved forward, and I guess that they probably fall into that category. We are talking about people who were there on day 1 to make sure that they did not miss out.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Redress Scheme
Meeting date: 12 January 2023
Oliver Mundell
Both of those points were helpful, and what you said will be appreciated.
A number of individuals who have life-limiting and serious health problems feel slightly frustrated when they hear “terminal illness”, because although they want other people who are in difficult circumstances to be successful and do not want to slow things down for them, they fall just short of the medical description of a terminal illness, and they feel that time is running out for them.
