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 ˿ and committees will automatically update to show only the ˿ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of ˿ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of ˿ 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 707 contributions
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Economy and Fair Work Committee
Scottish National Investment Bank
Meeting date: 16 March 2022
Gordon MacDonald
You commented on the need to make good investments. You also spoke about the bank’s risk appetite. How do you balance the need to make good investments with innovation and the bank’s risk appetite?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Scottish National Investment Bank
Meeting date: 16 March 2022
Gordon MacDonald
Good morning, Mr Watt. I will ask about the bank’s mission to address innovation. You have already talked about the need to improve productivity. How does the bank assess investment opportunities for innovation and what weighting is given to how an opportunity would improve productivity?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 2 March 2022
Gordon MacDonald
I will continue the discussion about ROS’s finances. You highlighted that you expect this year’s income to cover all costs, and this year’s quarterly update shows that your income will be about £95 million. If we look at the four years prior to the pandemic, your income ranged from £72 million to £78 million. During the first year of the pandemic, that collapsed to £65 million. That figure of £95 million is a substantial increase—it is 45 per cent up on the first year of the pandemic and 20 per cent up on 2019-20, which is the last full year for which there are figures. Is that substantial increase in revenue purely down to an increase in housing market activity?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 2 March 2022
Gordon MacDonald
Yes, it is. You quite rightly touched on the fact that your fees had not increased since 2011. The current inflationary pressures—the consumer prices index is at 5.5 per cent and is expected to be above 7 per cent before the end of the year—will no doubt put pressure on wages and other costs. Do you anticipate any increase in your fees in the next few years?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 2 March 2022
Gordon MacDonald
My last question is to do with the large increase in provisions in your 2020-2021 accounts. The “Movement in work in progress” budget line has increased from £190,000 to about £13.1 million.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Registers of Scotland
Meeting date: 2 March 2022
Gordon MacDonald
That is really helpful to understand. I would also like to understand your view on that income figure of £95 million. Do you expect that to grow in the next few years? I see in your corporate plan that you expect to get another £7 million of income up to 2025-26, but how much built-up demand is there, given the problems that there have been in the housing market, and do you see that plateauing in future years?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Tourism and Hospitality
Meeting date: 2 February 2022
Gordon MacDonald
I move on to the labour issues. We all hope that hotels return to their pre-Covid and pre-Brexit occupancy levels, and that restaurants start taking up the opportunities when people start travelling again, whether they be staycationers, business travellers or international tourists. However, we need the staff for that to happen.
Leon Thompson’s briefing paper says that there were 340,000 vacancies in the UK and around 40,000 in Scotland, and that 40 per cent of businesses were not confident in their ability to recruit staff during 2022. What do we need to do to take up those challenges and take advantage of the opportunities? How do we close that labour shortage gap?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Tourism and Hospitality
Meeting date: 2 February 2022
Gordon MacDonald
We have highlighted the need to attract new talent into the hospitality industry. Given that we have full employment, that many EU nationals left the country pre-pandemic and that there is no hospitality visa, Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce suggested on Friday that there should be a devolved immigration policy. Would the Scottish Hospitality Group support that, Stephen?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Tourism and Hospitality
Meeting date: 2 February 2022
Gordon MacDonald
Leon Thompson talked about the need for a new immigration system to attract workers, including, for example, the visas for which the hospitality industry called last year but which the UK Government rejected. Unemployment in Scotland is at a record low of 3.6 per cent, which is below the level at which there is considered to be full employment. At a briefing of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce on Friday, it was said that 90 per cent of the employees in the hospitality trade, particularly in Edinburgh, were EU nationals. Many of them went home because of the pandemic, but because of the end of free movement, they are having difficulty returning. How do we close the gap?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Tourism and Hospitality
Meeting date: 2 February 2022
Gordon MacDonald
Given the demographic challenges that you have highlighted, would you be supportive of the calls for either a hospitality visa or devolving the immigration system?
