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 2133 contributions
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Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Scottish Housing Regulator “Annual Report and Accounts 2021-22”
Meeting date: 20 December 2022
Willie Coffey
Do any of the houses not meet the standard because of dampness or condensation? Do they not meet the housing standard because of their structural condition in relation to dampness, condensation or mould, or is it because of all the functional things that you mentioned such as electrical installations and upgrades and so on?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Scottish Housing Regulator “Annual Report and Accounts 2021-22”
Meeting date: 20 December 2022
Willie Coffey
Will we see a register—or whatever it might be called—of local authority landlords’ properties, which will set out how they comply with the standard? Should addressing issues of dampness, condensation and mould form part of the standard?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Scottish Housing Regulator “Annual Report and Accounts 2021-22”
Meeting date: 20 December 2022
Willie Coffey
Lastly, not to labour the point, do you not think that, before they take up a tenancy, tenants have a right to know that the house that they are about to live in is free from dampness, condensation and mould, and that they have a right to have an authority tell them that that is so?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Scottish Housing Regulator “Annual Report and Accounts 2021-22”
Meeting date: 20 December 2022
Willie Coffey
Absolutely. Earlier, you mentioned the tragedy of the wee boy in Rochdale who lost his life because of a medical condition that was directly attributable to mould growth in the house where he lived. The story is not a new one. Having been an elected member for many years, I can say that cases of tenants having to ask for help with condensation, dampness and mould growth in their houses used to be the bane of my life. In my experience, housing officials regarded such problems as lifestyle issues for the tenants who lived in those houses, rather than being caused by structural issues there.
Are we now better informed about that issue? Will that tragic incident help us along that pathway? I note that you have written to social landlords, but I am not quite sure what you have asked them to do. For example, is it to conduct a survey or to be aware of the issue? If I were a tenant who was taking up a local authority house I would like to know whether it was damp and, if so, for the local authority to tell me that on some sort of register. Are we heading in that direction? Is that a good thing for us to be working on in future?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Scottish Housing Regulator “Annual Report and Accounts 2021-22”
Meeting date: 20 December 2022
Willie Coffey
Good morning. I will ask a couple of questions about the overall quality of the housing stock and touch on the issue of dampness, condensation and mould that George Walker mentioned in his opening remarks.
First, there seems to have been a bit of a dip in the number of properties that meet the Scottish housing quality standard—it is down from 87 per cent to 85 per cent. Could you give us a flavour of why you think that is?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of National Records of Scotland”
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Willie Coffey
Did NRS look at variations in population in relation to the level of access that people have to information technology and skills and so on? I was well aware of that when I ran the cross-party group in digital exclusion. There were huge differences, even within Scotland, of access to digital technology for people. Despite people’s willingness to participate in the online world, there is still an issue about whether some can actually do that. Will the further work try to investigate the portions of the population that could not participate as fully as they might have wished to?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of National Records of Scotland”
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Willie Coffey
I am curious about that, because we talk about target rates and response rates and they are entirely different things, as we all know. The UK target was not 97 per cent; it was 94 per cent. I am curious about why we think that we are significantly above or below when we do not know what target we are trying to reach for the survey to be valid. I note that in your report, Auditor General, you say that the census target response rate for Scotland’s local authorities was 85 per cent, which was exceeded by the actual response rate. I also note, from the ONS report on the census survey that was carried out in England and Wales, that the target was 80 per cent for local authorities in England and Wales. Why was there a lower target for response rates for England and Wales compared with that of Scotland?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of National Records of Scotland”
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Willie Coffey
Auditor General, before I ask a couple of questions about the work that remains to be done and some questions on the digital aspect of the census, I would like to know whether there is a standard—an industry standard or otherwise—percentage return rate that would be required to get a representative sample of the population in something like a census? What is the percentage figure or is there none?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of National Records of Scotland”
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Willie Coffey
The point that I am trying to make is that, if a target is set lower and the response rate significantly exceeds it, it looks as though the performance is better than might otherwise have been expected. The higher that a target is set, the more difficult it is to do that.
I will move on to another question on your report. As one of your key messages, you say:
“Significant work remains to be done during 2022/23 to ensure that the census delivers robust population estimates and other outputs.”
Will you tell us a wee bit more about what that work involves?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of National Records of Scotland”
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Willie Coffey
I turn to the digital aspect of the census. Were we hampered in Scotland by the public’s access to digital devices to complete the online survey? Could you start by telling us what the difference was between this census and the previous one? There was a big digital and online component to this census, which was not the case before, so has that been a significant factor?
