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 2155 contributions
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Stephen Kerr
Why do you think that is? What is your analysis? I suppose that we could draw a parallel with the census return, which was virtually catastrophic in Scotland compared with the rest of the UK.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Stephen Kerr
Can you comment on the accuracy issue? Again, and for information purposes and context, when an individual who is on the register no longer lives at the address, accuracy is at 9.7 per cent in Scotland. That figure is pretty much the same across the United Kingdom, is it not?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Stephen Kerr
If those numbers are correct.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Stephen Kerr
Do you have that metric on the take up? If you do not, you could let us know in writing.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Stephen Kerr
Is that in addition to Short money?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Stephen Kerr
I just think that it is important that people understand how their vote will be used to calculate how the Parliament is made up, frankly. I take your point that it is on your website, but I wonder whether we need to do a bit more to help the Scottish voting public know what it all means.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Stephen Kerr
Sorry, convener, but if 20 per cent of the potential electorate is missing off the registers, what does that mean for the Boundary Commission for Scotland’s work on equalising constituencies? It will use the same data set. So, straight away, there are in-built errors that, I presume, will impact both urban and rural areas.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Stephen Kerr
Yes, that is right.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Stephen Kerr
Do you have any specific geographic insight into the Scottish national position?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Stephen Kerr
Yes—