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 2001 contributions
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Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Scottish Human Rights Commission
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
Do you have a sense of the reason for that increase?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Scottish Human Rights Commission
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
Do you think that the inquiry will take your advice on that? Do you intend to give it advice to do that, or do you know how it will approach it?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Scottish Human Rights Commission
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
You made the point that there are two aspects to your work: protecting the legal floor for human rights and promoting human rights. In relation to protecting that floor, the committee—I am a member of two committees, but I am pretty sure that it was this one—heard from a group of learning disabled people, who spoke to us about their experience.
It was clear to me, given the number of people who are dying of preventable illnesses and the thousands of people who are stuck in hospital—in some cases, for years at a time—that the floor that we would expect for them is not being met. How can the committee ensure, through things such as the universal periodic review and the review of the 2018 report that Eilidh Dickson mentioned, that the floor is protected? What would you expect to see with regard to policy and budget that would allow us to tell whether we are protecting that minimum core?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Scottish Human Rights Commission
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
Do you know when we can expect the UK Government’s responses?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Scottish Human Rights Commission
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
What is your view on the Scottish Government’s response to the recommendations?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Scottish Human Rights Commission
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
Good morning, and thank you all for the information that you have provided so far.
During the pandemic, a number of things had to be paused, and you did some work on the Covid inquiry. In your view, do the terms of reference, which have been updated as a result of Lady Poole’s resignation, now take account of human rights? Do you expect that the inquiry will be framed by that, and can the committee or parliamentarians do anything to ensure that that is the case?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Scottish Human Rights Commission
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
Do you have a view about what that would look like?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Scottish Human Rights Commission
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
I have one further question about staffing and resources. In your opening statement, you mentioned that you are a “lean” organisation and you said that you hope to build up to having 14.5 members of staff during the coming year. We will talk more about the incorporation of the new human rights bill, but if that was required, do you think that you would need to exceed that number of staff for further incorporation, and do you have a sense of why you are leaner? Are you proportionately leaner, or do you have less resource and staff?
10:15Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Benefits Independent Advocacy
Meeting date: 24 November 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
Do you have a permanent physical base in Scotland?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Scottish Benefits Independent Advocacy
Meeting date: 24 November 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
Excellent. Convener, I have one final quick question. You said that you have done two redeterminations. I might be making assumptions, but I think that the figures suggest that five redeterminations have been decided on adult disability payments and 250 have been decided on child disability payments. Do you have any sense of why only two redeterminations have gone through your service?
