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 978 contributions
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Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
National Islands Plan Annual Report 2022
Meeting date: 24 May 2023
Karen Adam
Sorry—that was a supplementary question before my question 13.
I have just been told that we have run out of time for me to ask question 13, so I will ask for a written answer instead.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
National Islands Plan Annual Report 2022
Meeting date: 24 May 2023
Karen Adam
Well, that was a question.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
National Islands Plan Annual Report 2022
Meeting date: 24 May 2023
Karen Adam
That is great.
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Minimum Core Obligations
Meeting date: 23 May 2023
Karen Adam
Good morning, panel. The meeting has been absolutely fascinating, and I appreciate what Professor Miller said, because we need to get to the core of the disconnection and the feeling of disenfranchisement. What exactly are the obligations, and what would they look like in practice? My questions centre around that issue.
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Minimum Core Obligations
Meeting date: 23 May 2023
Karen Adam
What you have said about what the minimum core obligations look like in practice brings me back to what Professor Miller said about physical and mental health potentially being one of the core obligations. In the context of substance misuse, for example, what would such a core obligation look like if it was implemented?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Minimum Core Obligations
Meeting date: 23 May 2023
Karen Adam
Thank you for that. Perhaps I can ask Dr Webster the next question. In light of what we have heard and your own experience, do you think that the core obligations should be universal or relative to each individual?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 17 May 2023
Karen Adam
It is clarty. [Laughter.] That is one of those interesting questions. It depends, to an extent, on farmer behaviour. I would much rather that people were not buying animals in from areas with TB, but I recognise why some people do that. It also depends on our surveillance systems picking it up quickly, and, when it is picked up, on the appropriate control measures, such as the isolation of animals, being put in place.
Hand on heart, I think that it is unlikely that we will get an acute flare-up, but, as we saw last year, it only takes one farm with disease, which had probably been there, undetected, for a year or 18 months. It seeded disease to another 18 farms, I think, that we traced, of which seven or eight were positive. It is not impossible. What matters is that, when we find it, we deal with it robustly and quickly. Part of what we do is trace backwards and forwards. When we find an animal that is infected, we immediately go back to find out where it has been and what it has been in contact with, to determine where the disease may have come from. That involves testing a range of herds. We also look at any cattle that have left that farm, and we test them and the herd that they are in.
So, it is not impossible, but it is unlikely. That is probably as much as I can say.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Petition
Meeting date: 3 May 2023
Karen Adam
I thank the witnesses for their evidence so far. I will ask about the post-racing life of greyhounds. Last week, we heard from the GBGB, which noted that it contributes towards the costs of rehoming, for example. However, it is a different set-up at Thornton, where more dogs tend to come from homes that they live in, whereas, for GBGB tracks, the dogs are in kennels.
I ask the witnesses to give an overview of the post-racing life of a greyhound and the differences between those two models. Are there any huge differences and any cons?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Petition
Meeting date: 3 May 2023
Karen Adam
I will focus for a moment on how the dogs at Thornton are kept. Is there a secure way of collecting data on the post-racing life of those greyhounds when it comes to injuries, their behaviours and their quality of life?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Asylum Seekers in Scotland
Meeting date: 2 May 2023
Karen Adam
Thank you, convener, and good morning, panellists. Thank you so much for your contributions so far, which align with what I will ask about. I want to focus on solutions. Asylum and immigration policy is a reserved matter, but there are things that we can do within our devolved competence at the Scottish Parliament. Although we are fiscally constrained in many ways, there are things that we can do. What are your feelings about the new Scots strategy and the ending destitution together strategy? What is going well? What is not going so well?
