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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Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Mark Ruskell
We certainly will.
When will the Scottish Government’s international framework be reviewed and updated?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Mark Ruskell
I am talking about the UK international relations concordat, which, I presume, governs how the UK Government and the different UK nations work together—imagine that—on international relations.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Mark Ruskell
There is a key role for small initiatives to be established, which have the potential to grow into bigger initiatives that could attract more funding. I am interested to know—maybe you could write to the committee about this—how you are going to continue to support the growth of grass-roots initiatives, which seem to attract such a huge amount of voluntary support and engagement across Scotland and in Malawi and have the potential to grow into bigger programmes over time. I will stop there.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Mark Ruskell
Your submission focuses on soft power, which has been described slightly differently by some commentators—Pat Kane, for example, talks about the notion of “fizzy power”. It seems to be quite a fluid concept. Obviously, there are tangible benefits in that area, but how do we pin those down? Should Government set out some clear metrics and objectives in relation to how we measure and account for soft power? If we are talking about building relationships and trust, should it be more of a wellbeing indicator, which is valuable but is not the same thing as, for example, a country’s gross domestic product? How do we measure soft power and incorporate it into Government objectives?
09:30Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Mark Ruskell
I have a couple of quick questions for the cabinet secretary and his officials. The first is about the international relations concordat, which was drawn up in, I think, 2013, when we were in a very different world. Have there been discussions about revising that?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Mark Ruskell
Practically, what will the British Council be doing in relation to the Copenhagen hub? Where do you see the opportunities lying? Do they involve the creative sector and the screen sector, for example?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Mark Ruskell
That is good to hear. We took evidence a couple of weeks ago from the Scotland Malawi Partnership, and there was considerable concern about the pulling of the Malawi small grants scheme. There are concerns that the scheme was evaluated against objectives that were incorrectly written and that the full benefit of the scheme as it operated was not properly evaluated or reviewed. I recognise that that is quite a granular issue to hit you with this morning, but are you aware of those concerns? What commitment might you be able to give to ensure that they are properly addressed?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Scottish Government’s International Work
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Mark Ruskell
Yes, that is helpful.
Professor Nolan mentioned horizon Europe and some of the potential delays in getting associate membership of that programme. What are the delays? How have they manifested themselves? What are your hopes for a resolution?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
ScotRail
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Mark Ruskell
I do not have time.
Planning for that transformation means listening to passengers and workers, and ensuring that their voices are heard, including at board level. It is clear that ScotRail and previous operators have not run meaningful consultations on service delivery for many years. The most recent ticket office assessment was in 1991, and I do not think that there has been a national timetable review in living memory. The consultations that have taken place over the past months have been badly managed. The decision to conduct a massive consultation on timetabling during a pandemic, when passenger trends were deeply uncertain, was clearly flawed.
Last September, I ran an online town hall event on the timetable review for my constituents. Their concerns were very clear. Passengers were angry about the removal of direct services from Kirkcaldy to Perth and the increased waiting time for connections at Ladybank, which was a particular concern for old and vulnerable people and women. Passengers were also angry about the proposed dramatic increase in journey times from Perth to Edinburgh, especially when ScotRail representatives suggested at the meeting that rail could never compete against cars using the Queensferry crossing.
I welcome the fact that ScotRail has backed down on those damaging changes. I also congratulate the hundreds of my constituents who joined our campaigning action to help to make the case and force change. Let us see that as an early win for people power that can set the tone for a people’s ScotRail that listens to the needs of passengers and to the workers on our railway.
However, there is still more to do, including retaining customer-facing staff in stations and ensuring that the commitment that the minister has given that there will be no compulsory redundancies is carried over in full to the new contracts.
The issues with ScotRail will not disappear overnight. There is serious work to be done to make a people’s railway a reality, and that means recognising the challenges that we face and working hard to resolve them.
16:37Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
ScotRail
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Mark Ruskell
Does the minister recognise that many ScotRail workers are concerned that the protections that they currently have against compulsory redundancy might be under jeopardy with the move towards the public ownership of ScotRail? What reassurances can she give on that?
