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 1467 contributions
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Criminal Justice Committee
Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 31 January 2024
John Swinney
There is then the question of awareness. There have been examples that relate to your assessment of the current position. In some circumstances just now, people will be able to publish information because there is no lifelong anonymity protection in place. However, the point that I am interested in is how people will become aware of the obligation on every one of us who decides to impart anything in the public domain, which will carry should the legislation be enacted? What have you learned from international best practice about how that can be most effectively communicated?
We have before us, as you will have observed, a complex bill with many different elements. You are very experienced in respect of the particular element that we are discussing. What can we reflect on, in our feedback to Government, with regard to the importance of ensuring that people know what the law will be if the bill is enacted?
Criminal Justice Committee
Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 31 January 2024
John Swinney
I am grateful. I would like to follow up on Mr Findlay’s question and the Lord Advocate’s answer.
What the Lord Advocate has put on the record is very welcome, but it raises the question in my mind of whether any of that needs to be formalised beyond the basis of what has been agreed by the Government and the Crown. We have reached a place of welcome understanding, and the independence of the Crown has been clarified and assured. Does the Lord Advocate believe that any degree of formalisation is required, beyond what has been arrived at so far?
Criminal Justice Committee
Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 31 January 2024
John Swinney
I am grateful for that answer. It may be that we require not legislative change but rather a memorandum of understanding, or something of that nature. It would be helpful if that could be explored; we can also explore it with the cabinet secretary when we see her next week. I am grateful for that clarification.
Criminal Justice Committee
Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 January 2024
John Swinney
Thank you for that. That answer gets into some of the territory that links with other parts of the bill with regard to trauma-informed practice. One of the themes of the bill that I have been interested in is that, if that principle is to be faithfully applied in all situations, the courtroom dynamics have to change dramatically as a consequence. Would you agree with that conclusion?
Criminal Justice Committee
Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 January 2024
John Swinney
That is really interesting. You have made the point, points were made to us by Lady Dorrian, and the point was made very powerfully to us by the citing of a case by the Lord Advocate in the same evidence session on 10 January. In that case, the Court of Appeal laid down a very hard judgment about the conduct of a case in 2020, which is not terribly long ago. I have read the judgment of the Court of Appeal, which makes grim reading in 21st century Scotland. When I read that as a member of Parliament, I think to myself that we had better legislate for that because, even with the direction that I recognise that there has been from the Lord President and the Lord Justice Clerk throughout their tenure in order to improve those issues, there is still a way to go. Mr Di Rollo said that there is still a way to go.
Criminal Justice Committee
Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 January 2024
John Swinney
I want to pursue a point that Professor Chalmers made—although it relates to the contributions of all our witnesses—about the adequacy of the research base.
If I have heard it once in my time that we do not have enough research on a subject, I have heard it a million times. The airing of the research this morning has been enormously helpful in informing the committee’s proceedings, and my conclusion is that we should look at all the research in the round and make our judgments out of it. Would it be fair to say that the gold standard of research that we require here is to understand better the deliberative process of individual and collective jurors, and that we will never be able to fully get a hold of that?
Criminal Justice Committee
Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 January 2024
John Swinney
In that circumstance, though, we would have a written judgment that we could all pore over.
Criminal Justice Committee
Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 January 2024
John Swinney
The necessity of the reform provides the impetus for the action to be undertaken.
Criminal Justice Committee
Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 January 2024
John Swinney
Correct.
Criminal Justice Committee
Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 January 2024
John Swinney
I will take that example. That strikes me as highly analytical. I understand that point. Mr Di Rollo has just said that, although the culture has changed a lot, it has not changed enough. It still strikes me, as a member of Parliament who is scrutinising a bill on victims, witnesses and justice reform, that there is a risk that victims—complainers—might well be subjected to conduct that, if we do not pass the bill, might not be addressed by the reforms that we might leave for the legal profession to make in a piecemeal fashion.
