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 825 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Redress Scheme
Meeting date: 12 January 2023
Oliver Mundell
It is about one in 12.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Redress Scheme
Meeting date: 12 January 2023
Oliver Mundell
I am probably testing the committee’s patience, but this issue is important to me.
I want to follow on from Stephanie Callaghan’s question, as I have come across the same issue with people accessing statements and reports. I understand the sensitivity around that, and I fully appreciate the answer that you gave, but would it be fair to say that, when the bill was passed, it was not the Government’s expectation that the restriction order would be in place?
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.
Meeting of the Parliament
A75 Improvements
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Oliver Mundell
Will the member take an intervention on that point?
Meeting of the Parliament
A75 Improvements
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Oliver Mundell
I am pleased to see this important debate take place in the first week of the parliamentary new year. It should not have to take place at all; the improvements should have already been made. However, given where we are and given some of the other issues that have been debated in recent days, my constituents will at least be reassured that, thanks to the member for Galloway and West Dumfries securing this members’ business slot, we are seeing something of importance for our region on the Parliament’s agenda.
Improving connectivity rather than erecting barriers is the positive and constructive way to take things forward, and it will certainly deliver more jobs than erecting border posts. The importance of the A75 to the whole of Dumfries and Galloway cannot be overstated. The failure to properly upgrade the route has compounded our status as Scotland’s forgotten region. Delivering this vital upgrade would significantly boost the region’s economy and help reverse the trend of large-scale employment moving towards the motorway network and out of our region altogether.
Anyone who has driven on the A75 at the wrong time—or at any time—of day will understand the problem. In a small region, journey times between our communities can be a joke, particularly given the fact that many services, leisure pursuits, and employment opportunities are concentrated in Dumfries or Carlisle. After 15 years of SNP Government, many individuals and businesses have given up hope.
There have been so many false promises. What happened to the SNP manifesto promise to link Dumfries with the motorway network? Are some manifesto promises more important than others? What progress has there been on any transport infrastructure?
Meeting of the Parliament
A75 Improvements
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Oliver Mundell
That shows how poorly Emma Harper knows her region. As far as I am aware, Ayr is not a city, but it has significantly better transport links through the A77. The links are not great, but for a town of its size—it is comparable to Dumfries—it has seen a much better deal. The same is true of other towns across Scotland that are not cities. Dumfries has been left behind by the SNP; we have seen zero progress since the transport summit, which was much heralded in 2016, but did not even manage to happen within the 100 days of the election, as had been promised. It was a waste of time anyway, as predicted by local residents at the time.
All the more galling for those people who live and work in Dumfries and Galloway is that before the SNP was in government, it used to claim—locally, at least—that upgrading the A75 was its top priority. In fact, it claimed that it was the only party that was committed to doing so. However, the truth is that the SNP is the only party in government that has failed to deliver anything at all on that vital route.
I have sympathy for Emma Harper, because I do not know how she explains to local voters why her Government has done nothing. She makes the case in the chamber, but I do not know what she is doing to influence ministers behind closed doors, because they seem to be prioritising projects for her colleagues elsewhere in the country.
It is not too late for things to change, but despite the continued interest from the UK Government and its offer of support remaining on the table, the Scottish Government has been slow to even have a conversation with it. As Finlay Carson has set out, modest progress has been made, but it is not consistent with the level of support or effort that local people rightly expect. Will the minister commit to giving the project a green light and to turbocharging talks with the UK Government, and will she get personally involved in those talks and make the project happen?
I would be keen to hear specific plans and a timetable from the minister, but I doubt we will get that this evening. Instead, she might be willing to explain in straightforward terms to people who are living and working in Dumfries and Galloway why they deserve a second-class road network and why they should watch as investment is made elsewhere in the country as our region falls further behind. I suspect that under the SNP Government, we will not see anything that will come even remotely close to meeting the needs of people in Dumfries and Galloway, because the truth is that the SNP does not care about the region, and it does not care about the south of Scotland. That is why we see nothing.
17:41Meeting of the Parliament
A75 Improvements
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Oliver Mundell
While the minister is setting things out, could she explain to my constituents why, after 15 years of SNP Government, we do not have a business case or a detailed plan for any improvements on the route? We have a couple of vague promises in the case of Cuckoo Bridge, in Mr Carson’s constituency, for what I understand to be relatively minor improvements.
