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 2089 contributions
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Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 29 November 2023
Jim Fairlie
We have had various responses—I was trawling through them in the early hours of this morning. A number of organisations across the industry are saying that we need a guarantee of multiyear funding for at least five years.
Other than the Deputy First Minister speaking to the Treasury at the tail end of last year, is there on-going engagement with the UK Government to make sure that we can give our farming community that certainty for at least five years? It used to be seven years when we were in the EU—we are now looking at five.
A farmer can make quick decisions—I accept that; I have done it myself—but they also need to know where they will be in the longer term. What engagement is there with the Treasury right now?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 29 November 2023
Jim Fairlie
I have one further point. We had Jonnie Hall before the committee, who talked about what would happen if the UK Treasury runs down the value of agricultural support in England. Even if we keep 17 per cent of a much smaller budget, it will still reduce the budget that the Scottish Government will then have to support agriculture here, unless there is a specific guarantee from Westminster that the overall quantum stays the same, or is greater, given the demands of the industry. Is that correct?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 29 November 2023
Jim Fairlie
That is why I specifically asked about peat. It does not come under the bill.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 29 November 2023
Jim Fairlie
I did say at the start of my question that I found this to be a curiosity and that I was not going to hold you to anything.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 29 November 2023
Jim Fairlie
Just to follow up on Alasdair Allan’s question, I wonder whether the Scottish Government’s support through base payments—and we are talking about 80 per cent of the tier 1 and tier 2 payments here—crosses over into the internal market act. As Jonnie Hall alluded to, Scottish producers could, in theory, be given a market advantage with regard to the price that they could look for in the marketplace.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 29 November 2023
Jim Fairlie
Good. Thank you.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 29 November 2023
Jim Fairlie
My question has been kind of answered already. I was not going to hold you to this, but when you talked about simplification, I remembered how, when the regions were changed from two to three, it massively complicated things. I was going to ask you—and, again, I am not holding you to anything—to give me an example of what that simplification might look like. Have you put some thought into that?
Secondly, with regard to recovery of public funds, if somebody has taken public funds to restore peatland, for example, but they do not get to it—and never do—will you look to recover those funds? I presume that there would be a follow-up to those kinds of schemes—that is, where public funds are received for the restoration of peatland, but the work does not happen to the extent to which it was first planned. Is that where you are going with this?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 29 November 2023
Jim Fairlie
You say that you published a plan in June of what that looks like, but there is no requirement for it to be in the bill. Is that what you meant?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 29 November 2023
Jim Fairlie
I presume that that goes back to the convener’s question about the flexibility of the bill, and that therefore, as circumstances change, you could adapt the bill to allow certain things to fit in, such as Brexit, the war in Ukraine and so on.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 29 November 2023
Jim Fairlie
My understanding of high-quality food is that it does not matter which part of the stage of production it is; the end product is going to have that Scotch assurance or red tractor assurance or whatever assurance it is, because it has gone from there to there. It may have been bred on a very high hill place that is harsh and it may look to all intents and purposes as though things are rough, but that will go through a life cycle—I am talking specifically about livestock—that will still produce high-quality food. However, if somebody then injected lambs with something that we would not necessarily accept, I presume that that is the kind of area that you would look at and say, “Well, that does not qualify.” Does that make sense?
