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 2616 contributions
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Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
The flip side is that, if blue carbon was brought into the inventory, that might affect the targets but it might also provide solutions, such as blue carbon marine protected areas and seagrass or kelp restoration. As well as having to account for an entirely new part of our biosphere in our thinking on the inventory, that might open up opportunities for progress.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Electricity Infrastructure Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
Were particular lessons learned from the Beauly to Denny project, which took forever to get through? Landscape-scale mitigations were put in place, communities came forward to seek reductions in the wirescape in their surrounding areas and substations were moved, so some benefits flew from the project as well. Is that feeding into the current thinking? We have been here before with the Beauly to Denny project, where there were debates about undergrounding and everything else.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Electricity Infrastructure Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
I want to go back to the issue of community benefit for windfarms. When a lot of the windfarms were being developed in the early noughties, the community benefit payment levels were set quite low. Sometimes, the level is set at around £1,000 a megawatt. Some of those windfarms are seeking to expand or they are repowering. Is that an opportunity to dramatically increase the amount of money that communities are getting per megawatt from those projects as they seek to expand and become more efficient?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Electricity Infrastructure Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
The ambition of an extra 12GW is huge, so the potential benefit to communities is huge as well, regardless of whether that is through ownership or, indeed, through a smaller amount of money coming through a community benefit payment.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Electricity Infrastructure Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
I want to go back to hydrogen to explore the Government’s vision for that. We have targets in the energy strategy, for 5GW of hydrogen by 2030 and 25GW by 2045. I want to get a sense of where you see that generation coming from and the mix of blue hydrogen versus green hydrogen, or the transition to green hydrogen. Where do you see the 5GW of capacity coming from and how can that shift over time?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Electricity Infrastructure Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
I guess that the blue hydrogen would come from Grangemouth and maybe on-site generation at Mossmorran. Beyond that and the Acorn project cluster, are we looking at green hydrogen going forward?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Electricity Infrastructure Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
Okay. I will move on to the Acorn project and the CCS cluster. I think that there is recognition in the energy strategy and just transition plan that that is needed, particularly for hard-to-abate sectors. It is not clear that there is any other pathway to decarbonise those sectors. However, there are still risks and uncertainties around the deployment of the technology, and not least the track 2 process. What would we do if we did not have Acorn? Is there an alternative pathway in respect of energy? Are there other technologies or avenues that could be explored, or are all the eggs in one basket?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
Thanks very much.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Electricity Infrastructure Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
Can you give a picture of who will fund that, how it will be funded, and the relative contributions of industry and Government? Is there clarity on that?
Meeting of the Parliament
Europe Day 2023 and Alignment with European Union Laws
Meeting date: 9 May 2023
Mark Ruskell
The Tories’ Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill is not only a failure of statecraft but an attempt to systematically dismantle the state and, with it, the protections and rights that Britain helped to create during our decades of membership of the European Union. There are some welcome signs that the UK Government may be forced to weaken its approach to throwing EU laws over the cliff edge in December, but are there particular portfolios where the threat of a race to the bottom in standards still hangs over Scotland?
