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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Economy and Fair Work Committee
UK Infrastructure Bank Bill
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Ivan McKee
Clearly, if there is money coming north as a consequence of things that the UK bank does—it has already invested £200 million in broadband as part of its initial investments in Scotland—we would not want that to be caught up in issues around the Barnett formula.
My understanding is that there have been discussions on that at official level and some progress has been made. There is recognition that that issue needs to be addressed. We hope that it will be resolved, but nothing has been clarified definitively yet.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
UK Infrastructure Bank Bill
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Ivan McKee
It is certainly an issue in terms of the route that levelling up funds follow. I have not been as close to that, but there has been quite a bit of discussion about green ports and whether they impact Barnett or not. Things are being considered on a case-by-case basis, and that is why we feel that it is important to get some clarification and assurances on this investment.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
UK Infrastructure Bank Bill
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Ivan McKee
Yes.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
UK Infrastructure Bank Bill
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Ivan McKee
No—we are not asking for that. I meant, “Yes, the person could change.” We are just looking for the investment panels to include somebody who has an understanding of those issues.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Procurement Bill
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Ivan McKee
On procurement?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Procurement Bill
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Ivan McKee
Yes, I am very keen to engage with UK Government ministers as often as required. I wrote to my UK Government counterparts when they took office in the past few days. We have a Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy quadrilateral meeting in the diary already and other meetings are happening across my portfolio on a four-nations basis that will allow us to discuss these issues of trade, tourism and all manner of things that I am responsible for, such as digital. That is an on-going process. As those meetings start up again, these things will be discussed as part of that process.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Procurement Bill
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Ivan McKee
There are two clauses that we can highlight. Clause 83 gives UK Government ministers powers in devolved areas on the implementation of international agreements, which is concerning. Clause 103 likewise gives powers to UK Government ministers on cross-border arrangements. We think that both those clauses need to be amended. Are there any other aspects, Alasdair?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
UK Infrastructure Bank Bill
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Ivan McKee
If we get the issues resolved to our satisfaction, we will return with another recommendation at some point. That could be later this year or early next year—yes.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
UK Infrastructure Bank Bill
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Ivan McKee
That reinforces the point that I made about the importance of the UK Infrastructure Bank having an understanding of the Scottish context. We need to consider the impact of the decisions that it makes on the national performance framework, which is central to the Scottish Government’s priorities and the way that we work.
Officials might want to comment on the audit of the impact of that, but it will depend on what the investment is. I will take the current work on broadband as an example. If that goes as planned, it will have an impact on our broadband roll-out aspirations and contribute to our metrics on delivery of those. We monitor that as a separate piece of work. We can check and come back to you on the specifics.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
UK Infrastructure Bank Bill
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Ivan McKee
Divergence of priorities is an issue, and that is one reason why we want to have better processes for alignment in order to guard against that in the future. A memorandum of understanding will also help to ensure that the two institutions work together where it makes sense for them to do so and do not bump into each other, for want of a better phrase, when it comes to support for specific projects. When a project is looking for funding, it can talk to a number of institutions or investors. If the two banks understand each other and how they are operating in that space, it will make the process a bit more streamlined and efficient.
