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 1063 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scotland’s Commissioner Landscape
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Ivan McKee
Of course it is.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scotland’s Commissioner Landscape
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Ivan McKee
Are you saying that you do not think that there is a need for the commissioner?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scotland’s Commissioner Landscape
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Ivan McKee
Clearly, scrutiny is an important part of the work that the commissioner would do. The Parliament would carry out such scrutiny if it involved an SPCB body that had been created under its sponsorship. It is right that that is where it is done. As I have said, the resourcing conversation, which would be similar to that with every other public body, everywhere else that the Government spends its money, would happen through the budgeting process. The Parliament would make its case, and there would be a conversation there.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scotland’s Commissioner Landscape
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Ivan McKee
I do not accept that. Looking through a different lens, if we had the Government marking its own homework on some of this stuff, you would rightly be more upset. I think that Parliament absolutely has a role to play. As I said, there is a conversation about resourcing, and there is a place for that conversation to take place.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scotland’s Commissioner Landscape
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Ivan McKee
There are a few different issues there. On the scrutiny role, the Government wading in and saying that it wanted to hold commissioners to account would clearly not be acceptable, and the Government would not want to do that. Likewise, the Government saying that there should not be certain commissioners could be deemed as straying into that territory.
The creation of commissioners is a different issue. Although it would be the Parliament that would pass any legislation that created a new commissioner, the Government has a significant input into that in terms of both the position that it takes and, even with a minority Government, the weight that it holds in relation to whether legislation is passed by the Parliament. The Government absolutely has a role to play in its assessment of whether new commissioners are required and how they would fit into the broader public sector landscape. That is part of the work that I am taking forward, and it is key.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scotland’s Commissioner Landscape
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Ivan McKee
As I said, for the ones that have been set up, it is not the Government’s role to stray into the territory of scrutinising the work of bodies that are set up and sponsored by the Parliament and the SPCB.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scotland’s Commissioner Landscape
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Ivan McKee
I was not a Government minister at that point in time. My understanding is that the proposal was made in advance of the ministerial control framework being in place to assess it. As I say, the programme for government will come out in September, and it will contain the work that the Government proposes to take forward.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scotland’s Commissioner Landscape
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Ivan McKee
In relation to the seven existing commissioners, this goes back to what I said about it not being the Government’s role to decide to close down the offices of commissioners. People would rightly have concerns if the Government stepped into the parliamentary space and said that certain commissioners were no longer required and would be discontinued. Such a review should, rightly, be carried out by the parliamentary authorities.
As I said, there is a process for assessing whether new commissioners are required. The mechanism of including a sunset clause could absolutely be part of the toolkit, if everyone agreed that a commissioner was required and the proposal had passed through the control framework and other assessment processes. A sunset clause might be quite a valuable and helpful mechanism to guard against exactly what you have described.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scotland’s Commissioner Landscape
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Ivan McKee
Yes. I have extracts from the MCF in front of me. The criteria to be considered include whether the function or service could be carried out by an existing body such as the Scottish Government, an executive agency, or any other public body that has already been established. A number of other questions are asked, in a similar vein.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scotland’s Commissioner Landscape
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Ivan McKee
Yes, but the counterfactual is important. If part of what they see as being their role is to change perceptions and priorities, you could argue that, in an advocacy role, that is what they are trying to deliver. They are not necessarily trying to deliver a service.
However, you could also look at, for example, child poverty, and say that Scotland is clearly in a significantly better place than the rest of the United Kingdom. You could argue that there is evidence that supports that, but whether you attribute that to the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland is a matter for debate and for the relevant committee to dig into in more detail.
