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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
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.
Displaying 1535 contributions
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Ross Greer
In that case, the issue here is an initial communication failure. Can I check how young people were involved in the development of the revision material? You have young people on the national qualifications group and you have a learner panel. How were they involved in the construction of the material? Did they at any point flag up that it was perhaps a bit patronising to say that it is a good idea to spell words correctly?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Ross Greer
I understand that, for example, the specifics of an exam paper obviously cannot be shared in advance, but there is nothing compromising about sharing in advance that the paper is going to encourage young people to spell words correctly.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Ross Greer
I will pursue that point about reflection. I have sat on the education committee for six years, and, five years ago, the committee produced a major report on the SQA under Fiona Robertson’s predecessor. A consistent point of criticism of the organisation has been that there is a perceived defensiveness around external feedback, advice, criticism and so on. We went through that when Cameron Garrett, who was the first member of the Scottish Youth Parliament on the national qualifications group, was critical of how young people were treated through that process. Sophie Reid, who succeeded him, is now being critical of a lack of communication and a breakdown of trust.
I am going to pre-empt your answer somewhat and presume that you will say that there has been improvement over recent years. However, if we accept that premise, why do you think that nobody else sees that improvement?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Ross Greer
Just—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Ross Greer
Yes.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 6 September 2022
Ross Greer
It might be worth the committee getting in touch with Social Security Scotland about that.
My main line of questioning is about your consultation process. I am interested in how you will go about that in the fiscal sustainability review. Examples of priority areas that you mention are the climate and health inequalities, which are spaces that have pretty robust third sector organisations in them. Have those organisations engaged with Fiscal Commission consultation processes in the past? Do you have an established relationship with such groups, or are you taking a new approach in order to achieve a wider level of engagement?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 6 September 2022
Ross Greer
I would like to pick up briefly on Claire Murdoch’s explanation for why certain points of detail are not collected in the social security application process, which was that they are not necessary in order to process the claim. I will caveat my question by saying that I accept that you are not Social Security Scotland, so you might not know the answer—that is fine. I assume that the reason why Social Security Scotland is not asking questions as part of the application process that would otherwise provide useful bits of demographic data is that the more fields that are on the form, the more people will drop out of the application process. Is that the case?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 6 September 2022
Ross Greer
I am interested in what that will look like. I presume that a punter can go to the SFC’s website, fill in a consultation form and answer the questions there. However, if you are trying to get greater depth, particularly from those key groups with which you are engaging for the first time, what will that work look like? Will it involve workshops, seminars or one-on-one meetings?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 6 September 2022
Ross Greer
I have one final question, on a different note. You mentioned this at the start of the session, but much of your written submission is about improvements in data and process that should improve the accuracy of forecasts. On the flipside, given that inflation might top 20 per cent and we are entering an indeterminate period of profound economic instability, should we be expecting greater accuracy in forecasting in the immediate future? Are those improvements going to pay off in five or 10 years’ time once we are on the other side of that instability?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 6 September 2022
Ross Greer
What will the engagement process with stakeholders look like? That leads me into a wider discussion that the committee has had in the past, which is about public and stakeholder understanding of our public finance landscape, and the extent to which it is important for certain stakeholders to have a greater level of understanding of devolved public finances than is currently the case.
I will probably get a row from all my friends in the climate movement for saying that, in all the relatively well-funded third sector organisations in that space, I do not think that there are many people who have a depth of understanding of our public finances. Historically, that is not an area that those organisations and campaign groups have focused on. However, it is probably important that we get their input into the process. Whether we are talking about climate organisations or the alliance of healthcare organisations—which might be in a slightly different position but is probably in roughly the same place—will part of the process involve your assisting and enabling them to give useful feedback?