A searchable database of over 9,000 Select Committee transcripts, and growing every week.
What is it?
Select Committee Search is a searchable database of just over 9,000 Select Committee transcripts, covering the last 15 years of Select Committee evidence sessions, and is being added to every sitting day overnight as new evidence sessions take place.
How does it work?
You can search by Keywords, Member, or Witness, and filter by Committee and date.
Why only the last 15 years?
Many Select Committees have been going back decades, and yet this database starts from 2011 onwards. Prior to 2011, official parliamentary transcripts were not published in a clean, standardized HTML format, so to keep things clean and simple with reliable and quick search results, the database starts from 2011 onwards.
Can’t I just used AI?
It’s highly likely that within the next few years AI search engines will be able to find what you are looking for from Select Committee transcripts. However, we aren’t there yet. While AI search tools and large language models (LLMs) are improving, they currently struggle to accurately parse parliamentary data. Committee transcripts are published in a highly traditional, deeply nested HTML table format with complex speaker tags (e.g., “Witness: (Dr. Smith)”). Standard AI web-crawlers frequently lose track of who is speaking during interruptions or multi-page sessions, leading to hallucinations or missing data. Put this all together and AIs struggle. Select Committee Search was built because AI searches don’t find Select Committee text very well.