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.
Criathragan Hide all filters
Displaying 3006 contributions
|
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 9 September 2021
Richard Leonard
I will come back to that point in a minute, but I wanted to ask about something else that is covered in your report. It would have been very fresh at the time of the report and we now have some benefit of a slightly longer view of it. Money was set aside to help with the logistics of schools reopening at the start of the year. I think that there was £50 million additional funding allocated to help schools reopen safely. At the time, as I recall, councils said that it was insufficient to do what we need to do, but I think the Scottish Government said that it was sufficient. Have you had an opportunity to review that to see whether somebody was right and somebody was wrong?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 9 September 2021
Richard Leonard
Thank you very much indeed. This week, you made an important statement in a blog reflecting on 10 years since the Christie commission report was produced. If you do not mind me quoting you, because I think that it is important that this is on the record, I note that you warned that the country “remains riven by inequalities”, but you also said that it remains the case that there is
“a major implementation gap between policy ambitions and delivery on the ground.”
With reference to this morning’s inquiry, you said that
“progress on closing the poverty-related attainment gap between the most and least deprived school pupils had been limited.”
That is a very powerful statement of how you see things. Could you reflect on that and perhaps outline for us what you think needs to change so that that huge implementation gap that you spoke about can be closed?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 9 September 2021
Richard Leonard
Thank you, Mr Clark. I now turn to Sharon Dowey, who has a series of questions to ask.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 9 September 2021
Richard Leonard
Thank you. Before I widen the questioning, there is one other thing that I want to come back to, which again was mentioned in your opening statement—the OECD report that came out in June this year, just a couple of months after your own report was produced. In the briefing note for today’s committee meeting, you say that there are some common themes between the conclusions you arrived at and the conclusions and recommendations that were made by the OECD. It would be useful for us to hear from you what those common themes are and whether there are clear recommendations that come from those common themes that would do what the report says we need to do. I think that we are all agreed on the need to improve outcomes for young people in a broader sense through school education.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 9 September 2021
Richard Leonard
I will open the questioning to the whole committee now, starting with Willie Coffey.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 9 September 2021
Richard Leonard
Thank you. That has been a very useful line of questioning. I will now turn to Colin Beattie, who has a number of questions around outcomes.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 9 September 2021
Richard Leonard
Craig Hoy has a series of questions. I think that he wants to make a declaration of interests before he puts his questions.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 9 September 2021
Richard Leonard
I think that Antony Clark wants to come in with a few points on the same area.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 9 September 2021
Richard Leonard
One of the things that is mentioned in the report, which I think Mr Boyle referred to, is data. Paragraph 25 of the report puts it very starkly when it says:
“The Scottish Government’s national aim is to improve outcomes for all, but it has not set out by how much or by when.”
From an auditing perspective, that sounds like quite a major flaw, doesn’t it?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report
Meeting date: 9 September 2021
Richard Leonard
We will return to some of these themes during the course of this morning’s session. As you stated at the beginning, the report takes us up to January 2021 and, obviously, quite a lot has happened since that time. Have you been able to gather any more information about where things are now? Have you been able to understand whether some of the actions that were recommended in your report, for example, have been followed up at a central and local government level?
