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 1690 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Michelle Thomson
Yes. I accept your point, because until we have the data, we cannot start to make that assessment. I do not know whether Emma Congreve has anything to add in response to my two questions.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Michelle Thomson
Yes—I am trying to make that distinction. It is not like for like in quite the way that was set out.
I turn to my other question. I am interested in the point that you make at paragraph 13 of your submission. Can you give us a bit more flavour on disaggregating data in order to distinguish between employment activities that are in the public sector in Scotland but are not in the public sector in England? From the point of view of comparing apples with apples, that is very interesting, because the picture is quite opaque when we look at that per capita spend.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Michelle Thomson
For what it is worth, I think that it is very good to have that. It is a positive, and I wanted to get the understanding of it on the record, so I thank you for that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Michelle Thomson
I have quick question on something that has come up a number of times in a variety of these sessions about the budget process. I fully accept what you are saying—I think that most people would agree that it is somewhat inefficient. Do you collect any data about that? When I say “inefficient”, I mean these late changes at the 11th hour, where you think you that have spend, you allocate it and then you need to move it from budget pots or whatever—there is a whole variety of things.
Do you have any sense of the additional cost of doing that in terms of hours accrued, because that is a hard figure? You must be collecting days spread throughout all the departments that are working on it. Do you have any sense of that—apart from loss of hair?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 2 March 2022
Michelle Thomson
I hear what you are saying about the transition—it is very clear. It would be helpful for me to understand what applications and coding skills you are talking about. I guess that your ability to grow people, particularly when you get into complex bug fixing, is an essential part of keeping the show on the road, but is there a bespoke application? What sort of coding skills are required?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 2 March 2022
Michelle Thomson
Thank you.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 2 March 2022
Michelle Thomson
Yes—good morning and thanks for coming along, Jennifer. I want to explore a wee bit more about the IT contractors. Your annual accounts give the costs
“primarily to meet the digital requirements of updating legacy IT systems and evolving our IT estate onto a long-term sustainable basis”
as about £132,000 a year, which looks to me like folk working for 11 months a year on a day rate of £600, roughly.
How, specifically, do you plan to do what you have set out and get the crossover that you have alluded to—building the skills of the permanent staff while starting to move the fairly high numbers for contractors. Can you tell me a wee bit more about that?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 2 March 2022
Michelle Thomson
Yes. I do not know whether I am right on the day rate, because it was just a quick calculation. I am asking about types of skills, because people who have skills such as Java will be picked up. Although your plan to get your staff up to speed on those skills addresses one problem, it also introduces a new organisational risk, because those staff will have skills that are sellable at a daily rate of £600, which most people would consider useful. Can I assume that the risk side, from an IT perspective, is also in your personnel planning?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 2 March 2022
Michelle Thomson
Thank you for all that—it is helpful. I have a last wee quick question, which I hope that you can answer quite quickly. How confident are you in your ability to bring down the bill for contractors? I am thinking specifically about your budgeting for keeping the show on the road. From my experience in a previous life, I know that that is always extremely difficult, because IT bought-in costs are always going up and it is difficult to keep people.
A quick answer is fine.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Michelle Thomson
I have a couple of questions for you, Eileen. A number of times, the committee has had a discussion about the benefits of multiyear versus single-year budgeting. In principle, everyone understands that issue. How aware are you of the challenges that the Scottish Government has had because of its inability to undertake multiyear budgeting?
