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 415 contributions
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Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Pandemic Preparedness
Meeting date: 3 June 2025
Patrick Harvie
Thank you.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Pandemic Preparedness
Meeting date: 3 June 2025
Patrick Harvie
Just as you do not want to downplay the importance of flu planning, I do not want to downplay the importance of pandemic planning in isolation, but how does such planning integrate with a wider approach—what has been described as a whole-system approach—to emergency planning? Planning for a pandemic is very important, but it has to be seen as part of our wider understanding of how the country responds to emergencies.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Pandemic Preparedness
Meeting date: 3 June 2025
Patrick Harvie
Will that be specifically for health?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Pandemic Preparedness
Meeting date: 3 June 2025
Patrick Harvie
Good morning to our witnesses. I will briefly pick up on one of Sandesh Gulhane’s points before I move on to my own questions about the relationship with the US. One of the things that the US Administration is threatening to do is prohibit publicly funded researchers from publishing in respected peer-reviewed journals and potentially to set up alternative journals that look as though they would be guided by the ideology of politicians who have been known to promote conspiracy theories and debunked science. If that happens—if that threat is realised—would you agree that there is a need to re-evaluate US agencies as partners?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Pandemic Preparedness
Meeting date: 3 June 2025
Patrick Harvie
That brings us on to my final question. One of the flaws that were identified with the 2011 influenza preparedness strategy was the lack of an economic and social dimension to it. That covers a great deal that is non-medical and not specific to a health pandemic but still very relevant to a health pandemic, and it would have been relevant five years ago.
Trust and trusted sources of information in an age of disinformation are very important, as is community infrastructure, so that people know where they can get help informally and quickly. Are we investing in those community organisations and relationships? We have not been for 15 years or so.
There are also very basic things such as homelessness. Having safe, secure and adequate housing is important to keep people safe in any emergency, particularly during a pandemic. Can you comment on the extent to which a connection—beyond the direct medical and public health response to a pandemic—is being made to the social and economic conditions that will enable us to weather a storm?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Pandemic Preparedness
Meeting date: 3 June 2025
Patrick Harvie
From the public health perspective, public health is fundamentally shaped by social context.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Pandemic Preparedness
Meeting date: 3 June 2025
Patrick Harvie
I appreciate those answers—it is inevitable that there will be a health focus this morning, given the witnesses—but I am asking about the context. Is that work being done in the context of implementing the recommendation that the UK Government and devolved Governments should work together to introduce a whole-system civil emergency strategy?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Pandemic Preparedness
Meeting date: 3 June 2025
Patrick Harvie
Is it beginning?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Pandemic Preparedness
Meeting date: 3 June 2025
Patrick Harvie
If it happens, will that judgment rest with you as the CMO, rather than with ministers?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Pandemic Preparedness
Meeting date: 3 June 2025
Patrick Harvie
I will move on. Whatever level of technological and research progress we have—and there have been some positive and optimistic comments about that—the planning and preparedness need to be there if we are to get effective use out of it.
Before Covid hit, the influenza preparedness strategy was, essentially, the only game in town. The devolved Administration in Scotland had adopted it, despite having the option to go in a different direction. The inquiry has found significant flaws with that strategy, not least that it was specific to influenza, which did not turn out to be what hit us. Presumably, that was one of the reasons why the strategy was effectively abandoned early on and the different Administrations in the UK went their own ways with new approaches.
The inquiry noted that there has been some work on various documents since then, but it found that there is still a lack of clarity in how both the problems and the solutions are set out. It recommended a UK-wide whole-system civil emergency strategy. Where are we with implementing that recommendation—both at a UK level and under the devolved Administration in Scotland?
