Chamber and committees

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.

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.

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Meeting of the Parliament

Social Security (Investment)

Meeting date: 7 February 2024

Jackie Dunbar

Although I am pleased to be taking part in today’s debate, I will be even more pleased to see the day when the cost of living crisis and inequality are no longer an issue here in Scotland. However, at the moment, they are, and we are still trying to mitigate the situation.

Therefore, I am delighted to hear that the Scottish Government will invest a record £6.3 billion in social security in the year ahead. That money is an investment in the folk of Scotland, in our social contract with them and in the safety net that should be there to catch folks when times get tough. Right now, times are tough.

During the cost of living crisis, every single penny that we can put towards helping folk to get by is worth it. I am particularly pleased that, when folk interact with Social Security Scotland, they are treated with dignity, fairness and respect. That approach is a key part of why 90 per cent of people who had been in contact with Social Security Scotland said that their experience with staff was “good” or “very good” and 93 per cent felt that they were treated with kindness. I think that that approach stands in sharp contrast to what folk have experienced with the UK Government’s Department for Work and Pensions, especially since the UK Government first started to implement its welfare reforms.

The idea that social security needed to be reformed was not in itself a bad idea, but it was not simply reformed. Instead, billions of pounds of support was snatched from the very hands of folk who needed it most, right across the UK. Looking back, I remember the devastation of those who had been sanctioned and simply did not know where to turn to for help. I remember the fear of those who did not know how they would cope with the impending bedroom tax. I remember the trepidation of those who were asked to attend a work assessment, including those with lifelong or terminal conditions. I remember the implementation of the benefit cap, the child cap and the rape clause. I remember food banks becoming commonplace.

For a lot of folk, the early 2010s was when their cost of living crisis started. That was when they started to struggle to afford food and electricity. That was when they could no longer afford to socialise, play sports or enjoy certain hobbies, or to take part in a wide range of activities that give joy and meaning to life, because they cost money. In the past two years, most folk have cut back on such things or have simply gone without.

I am worried about how many folk are now struggling with their utility bills, their housing costs and their food bills, because those are the price rises that hit folk hardest. However, my even greater worry is for the people who have been struggling for a decade or so. The pressures that they face are not cost of living pressures. Heating, shelter and food are basic essentials. The challenge that they now face is with the cost of merely surviving. They face that situation because the UK Government did not see the value of social security and the safety net that it is supposed to offer in time of need. Today, I welcome the fact that the Scottish Government values that safety net and that Social Security Scotland is starting to repair it.

That this Parliament has the power to make some differences is a result of the independence referendum and the Smith commission that followed. If we look at the communities that have been hardest hit by the Tory welfare cuts, we see that they are the communities where support for Scottish independence was the highest. In my Aberdeen Donside constituency, that was certainly the case across Middlefield, Mastrick, Cummings Park, Northfield and Heathryfold. I know that we will have seen that in other communities right across this nation.

It is fair to say that, during that campaign, many of the folk who were struggling to get by saw the prospect of independence as a light at the end of the tunnel. Those of us in the yes campaign promised that things could be better with independence, with control over our own affairs. The independence campaign gave a lot of folk hope, and we saw how powerful that hope could be with the turnout that we saw on 18 September 2014.

The aftermath of the referendum saw the Smith commission and further devolution, and now this Parliament has some power over welfare. What has followed has been the establishment of Social Security Scotland. We are building a social security system that, even at this early stage, is offering support from the cradle to the grave, with best start grants, best start foods and the game-changing Scottish child payments there for the start of life, while funeral support payments are supporting families who are grieving the loss of a loved one at the end of life.

All of that has helped to bring about a situation in which 90,000 fewer children are growing up in poverty than might be otherwise. That is investing in Scotland’s future, and that is what we can do with just some control over our own affairs. There is more to do, but we are on the right path, and continued record investment in social security will help to make the fairer and more equal Scotland that we all want to see a reality.

16:07