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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
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.
Displaying 1499 contributions
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 20 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
Arguably, then, you are suggesting that there should be more transparency and that there needs to be linkage to various outcomes.
I do not know whether the Auditor General wants to come in on that point. It strikes me as an interesting area.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
So it is not actually your customers who have said this. You used the term “customers”, but it is a committee of the Law Society that has suggested that approach rather than the customers at the end of the chain.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
But surely some customers will not know that there is a problem with cases going back to 2017 until it is uncovered, by which time it will be too late.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
I think the convener is going to come in here—
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
I am sorry—it is not a supplementary question. It is on something entirely different, and it is a quick question for the end.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
My question is a supplementary one to that question. Land register completion by local authorities is quite variable. There are some very high completion rates for some local authorities; incredibly, others have a rate below 50 per cent, and some have zero per cent. I want to understand what influence, if any, you have over that completion by local authorities and why there is such disparity in those figures, regardless of whether you separate that from the land register or unlocking sasines.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
Do you have an active plan for the next wave of how to engage with local authorities, given the disparity in the figures? I appreciate that the local authorities have been affected by Covid and are restarting a lot of their operations.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
You have said that you spoke to your customers, but what specific feedback did you get from those who still had outstanding cases from 2017? Did they say that they wanted the cases that had been lodged more recently to be dealt with first? Did you break it down in that way?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
Yes, we are quite pushed for time.
If the convener agrees, I just want to ask on behalf of the committee whether you can come back to us with an outline of your specific strategy for dealing with cases from 2017 and reflect on what threads of that will influence your strategy for dealing with backlog cases from subsequent years. I do not accept the sort of revisionist approach that suggests that by getting rid of the term “backlog”, you can get rid of the backlog itself. If some of these historic cases are not dealt with, it could be “catastrophic”—I agree with Mr Robertson’s assessment here—if a rejection were to occur, hence my asking about your strategy.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Michelle Thomson
Am I correct in understanding that the time period for expedite cases does not include the period of time since they were lodged? Has your process changed?