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 1492 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Ross Greer
Thanks very much. That is all from me, convener.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Ross Greer
Absolutely. Thanks very much.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Ross Greer
That is relevant to questions on preventative spend. We can keep launching more money into health, but it is not going to reduce demand. The challenge for us, then, is how we take money out of health and put it into prevention. That is politically challenging.
Finally, I want to ask about your projections for growth in local government tax revenue—and I accept that this will be more of a political question that you might want to avoid completely. It feels like we are relying far too little on local government tax, bearing in mind that in Scotland we rely too much on devolved income tax. Under our current powers, it is through local government tax that we can tax wealth, property and so on—in other words, we have more latitude with local government taxation—but the projected growth from local government tax is minimal and the overall share of tax revenue from local taxes relatively minimal. Do you have concerns that, given the overall issue of fiscal sustainability here, not enough discussion is being had about how to reform local taxation?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Ross Greer
Absolutely, John. Thanks.
The report notes that the growth in the block grant is largely going to be driven by increased health spending in England. If the assumption is that the consensus in Scottish politics continues and that health consequentials go straight into Scottish health spending, I presume that that will result in a relative deficit in non-health areas—that is, everything other than health—of Scottish Government spending and that they will be worse than the overall headline figure. Has any work been done on trying to disaggregate that to look at the sustainability of all of our non-health spending?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Ross Greer
That is our job—we all pick the number that we want.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Ross Greer
Thanks, convener. I should flag up that I have an event with the Presiding Officer at 25 past 12, so I will apologise now for having to slip out early if we run over a wee bit.
I should also caveat my question by saying that, like colleagues on the committee, I really appreciate the huge amount of work that has gone into the report. On the productivity projections, would you, for illustrative purposes, be able to project the impact on the deficit—the 1.7 per cent and 10 per cent figures—if our productivity, instead of running as currently projected, were to mirror the European Union average, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average and so on?
Going back to the convener’s point about policy choices, I know that everybody and their gran has, at some point, come up with a plan to boost productivity, and none of them has really worked. How much effort should we continue to put into that instead of trying to pull other policy levers to address the deficit?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 22 March 2023
Ross Greer
Do any of the witnesses’ organisations have engagement and contact with transportation providers in relation to secure accommodation? If so, I have some specific follow-up questions; if not, there is no need for them.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 22 March 2023
Ross Greer
The bill will take some time, whereas we could produce policy in a matter of months.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 22 March 2023
Ross Greer
Does anyone else want to contribute?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 22 March 2023
Ross Greer
I will elaborate on that a bit. You might have seen the evidence that has been submitted by the hope instead of handcuffs campaign, which raises specific concerns about private transport providers. In essence, the concerns relate to the lack of regulation and reporting on transportation.
In relation to secure accommodation, the broad direction of travel has been towards raising standards, with more reporting and less use of inappropriate restraint, for example. However, the campaign has evidence of what it believes to be inappropriate use of handcuffs, specifically, and restraint in general by private transportation providers when young people are being moved between secure accommodation locations or between somewhere else and secure accommodation. The campaign has proposed to the committee and Parliament that there should be greater regulation and greater reporting specifically in relation to transport.
If private transportation providers were required to report every instance in which restraint was used, whether that was handcuffs or something else, which would be the appropriate body to which such reports should be submitted? Would it be the SCRA, the Care Inspectorate or local authorities? Would it depend on the individual circumstance, such as where the young person was being transported to and from?
