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 3014 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
“Scotland’s colleges 2024”
Meeting date: 28 November 2024
Richard Leonard
I invite James Dornan to put some questions to the witnesses, which will continue with the theme of staffing and the position of the workforce in the colleges sector and how that has been funded and handled.
Public Audit Committee
“Scotland’s colleges 2024”
Meeting date: 28 November 2024
Richard Leonard
Thank you very much. I will turn to a fairly routine but fundamental question that we ask witnesses: do you accept the findings and recommendations in the Audit Scotland briefing? I ask Neil Rennick to answer first.
Public Audit Committee
“Scotland’s colleges 2024”
Meeting date: 28 November 2024
Richard Leonard
Mr Boyle, does the Scottish Funding Council accept the findings and recommendations?
Public Audit Committee
“Scotland’s colleges 2024”
Meeting date: 28 November 2024
Richard Leonard
I said in the session with the Auditor General that it is important to put on the record that colleges provide an important bridge for people from disadvantaged backgrounds and deprived communities—a bridge into work, a bridge into retraining, a bridge into higher education from further education for some, and a bridge from social isolation. When I speak to people in the colleges sector, they tell me that there are some “perpetual students” who keep enrolling on courses. In part, that performs a certain social function. People who otherwise would be left behind, would be isolated and would be cut off from society find some purpose in life by enrolling on college courses.
Going back to my first question, I am asking whether you have made any assessment of whether the contraction of courses available has or will have unequal impacts on learners.
Public Audit Committee
“Scotland’s colleges 2024”
Meeting date: 28 November 2024
Richard Leonard
I think that there will be some questions later on the funding formula.
I will move us on to another area that is contained in the Auditor General’s briefing, which is the job evaluation process for support staff. We have followed up on that with correspondence with College Employers Scotland, Unison and Unite. I should point to my entry in the register of members’ interests and my membership of Unite the union. The picture that we get back from College Employers Scotland is that it is committed to the job evaluation process for non-teaching staff and that it is committed to backdating any agreement through the job evaluation process to, I think, 2018.
There are various perspectives on that. The Unison perspective seems to be fairly frank and robust. The response from Unite finishes by saying:
“Unite and our members have lost faith in the project, some members have also lost interest, but other members are frustrated as they are confident that job evaluation would have delivered an increase in pay which they have been waiting for this last 5 years or so.”
There is pent-up demand, and there is an outstanding job evaluation process. It seems, at least from reading the replies that we have had from the employers and the trade unions, that there is a willingness to get the issue resolved, but that has financial implications. How is that going to be funded?
Public Audit Committee
“Scotland’s colleges 2024”
Meeting date: 28 November 2024
Richard Leonard
Does the Scottish Government or the minister not have any responsibility for making sure that the outcome of the job evaluation process is an objective assessment of whether people are being paid correctly? Some people may get paid less as a result of the job evaluation, but there is obviously also an expectation that some people will receive an uprating in their pay to reflect their duties. Does the Scottish Government not take any responsibility at all for that?
Public Audit Committee
“Scotland’s colleges 2024”
Meeting date: 28 November 2024
Richard Leonard
Many people have been calling for that for a long time. How do you achieve that when, as we were told earlier in the evidence session, individual colleges work with their regional economies and local employers? How do you get a national strategic approach to skills planning that takes a longer-term view about the direction that the economy is going in and the skills of the future that we will need that might be different or adapted from the skill sets that we are training people for at the moment? How do you reconcile the local and the national?
Public Audit Committee
“Scotland’s colleges 2024”
Meeting date: 28 November 2024
Richard Leonard
Just to be clear about the process, if the job evaluation exercise is concluded and, as a result, there is a net additional staffing cost for non-teaching staff, the Scottish Government will stump up the money to cover it and hand it over to the Scottish Funding Council, which will, in turn, make sure that colleges can pay the non-teaching staff what they are now due—and there will be a backdated element to that.
Public Audit Committee
“Scotland’s colleges 2024”
Meeting date: 28 November 2024
Richard Leonard
I invite Colin Beattie to put some questions to you next. There are some themes that we might return to before we conclude.
Public Audit Committee
“Scotland’s colleges 2024”
Meeting date: 28 November 2024
Richard Leonard
We are going to come on to that point. My understanding is that the range of college courses has contracted as a result of those flat-cash settlements and real-terms cuts.
Mr Rennick, I think that you said in your opening statement that learners at our colleges are disproportionately from the least advantaged communities. Have you carried out any equality impact assessments or economic impact assessments of the reduction in courses?
