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
Public Service Reform Programme
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Ross Greer
Your submission mentions opportunities for collaboration, particularly with local authorities when it comes to property and estates. Do you have any examples of where such collaboration has worked well to increase efficiency?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Economic and Fiscal Forecasts and Medium-term Financial Strategy
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Ross Greer
How much of the reduction in the number of eligible children is a result of the reduction in the overall population versus the relative socioeconomic situation with regard to children? I think that, over the five-year period covered in the paper, we are looking at a drop of something like 25,000 children in the primary school roll.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Economic and Fiscal Forecasts and Medium-term Financial Strategy
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Ross Greer
I have a couple of questions about the calculations on social security spend in figure 5.3, which is on page 81 of your report. I would appreciate a little bit more information.
Part of the theory of the Scottish child payment is that, if we give families more income, we create the stability for them to find themselves in a better financial situation in which they do not require the payment. The calculations that you have in the figure show a dip over the next couple of years but that then slowing down over the last couple of years in the cycle. Will you explain a little bit about that tailing off in the decrease?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Economic and Fiscal Forecasts and Medium-term Financial Strategy
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Ross Greer
Yes.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Economic and Fiscal Forecasts and Medium-term Financial Strategy
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Ross Greer
Is the west, then, going to become that drag? Are we going to see the gap between earnings in the east and west continue to grow? Concerns have been expressed about that—I have certainly heard them locally—off the back of the announcement of free ports being established in the north and the east of the country, but not in the west. I must stress that I am not in favour of free ports, but we are already seeing a fall not just in the population but in average income growth on the west coast compared with the rest of the country.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Economic and Fiscal Forecasts and Medium-term Financial Strategy
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Ross Greer
As I was bringing up the issue of free ports, another question occurred to me. Have you made any projections on the basis of their expected economic impact? I realise that we are still very early in the process.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Economic and Fiscal Forecasts and Medium-term Financial Strategy
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Ross Greer
Thanks very much. That is all from me, convener.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform Programme
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Ross Greer
It has been mentioned already that NHS Ayrshire and Arran has been running at a deficit since 2017, but quite a lot of progress was made in closing that deficit between 2017 and the start of the pandemic, when everything went out the window somewhat. How did you manage that year-on-year reduction in the deficit over that three-year period before the pandemic financial years?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform Programme
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Ross Greer
Thanks very much.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Economic and Fiscal Forecasts and Medium-term Financial Strategy
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Ross Greer
On a different note—and moving away from that particular table—I heard at the start of the session Francis Breedon make a comment about the north-east no longer being as much of a drag on the Scotland-wide income growth figures over the next couple of years. When the committee took evidence—late last year, I think—on regional differences in income growth, we found that the really stark difference was between the east and the west of the country. That was reflected in the population figures, too, with all local authorities on the east coast projected to grow and Argyll and Bute and Inverclyde having the most significant decrease. How much of that regional data are you able to draw on for the purposes of this projection?
