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 1593 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Clare Haughey
No—I mean in terms of cash.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Clare Haughey
No. What was your role in governance at the university? Earlier, you said that it was not to scrutinise—or you implied that it was not to scrutinise. Is that not the case?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Clare Haughey
Sorry for interrupting you. You say that it was not up to the court or the committee that you were talking about to scrutinise, but that that was done at a lower level.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Clare Haughey
That is, the actual workings—the gubbins of it. It sounds to me, as well as to my colleagues, given the murmurings that I am hearing, that that just does not seem to have been there. Those papers then came to the court and they were just accepted. I will move on slightly, as other colleagues might well have questions on that.
We have 632 full-time equivalent posts going. How many of those redundancies are at senior management level?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Clare Haughey
What was the role of governance at the university?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Clare Haughey
We might move on to that, but we are straying from what I asked about.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Clare Haughey
It was at the lower level that the scrutiny should have taken place, but it does not sound as if it did. My apologies for not using the correct parlance for universities.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Clare Haughey
Thank you.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Clare Haughey
Evidently, it was not.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Clare Haughey
We are running out of time. That is fine; I am happy to be corrected on that point. What I am trying to get at is how many of the roles that are going will be those of front-facing teaching staff and staff who interact with students, who are carrying out the teaching and the research and are involved in learning, and how many roles will be going from the operational side of the university, whose salaries seem quite generous.
