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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Displaying 2272 contributions

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Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)

Covid-19

Meeting date: 27 May 2021

Michelle Thomson

Thank you, Presiding Officer, and I welcome you to your place.

It is a great honour to be called to speak in this debate as the new member for Falkirk East. I would like to put on record my grateful thanks to everyone who helped me get to this point, and in particular, my constituents.

The previous distinguished member, Angus MacDonald, was noted for his hard work, his complete commitment to the people of Falkirk East and his drive to bring new ideas and innovation to the fore. In that respect, perhaps his qualities are a metaphor for the qualities that we need to shape post-pandemic Scotland.

Reflecting for a moment on history, in the aftermath of world war two, no country sought to return to the past—a new international order had to be built. Many nations sought to reprioritise their domestic agendas and fundamentally change the face of their societies. Empires broke up and many countries entered the world stage as independent states.

We face a different context, but the response must be no less ambitious and no less audacious. That is why I applaud the first 100 days plan from our Scottish Government but note that it is only the start of our ambitions.

I particularly welcome the support for business and the economy. My friend Professor David Simpson has recently spoken about the need to move beyond talking about economic growth or green growth to talking about economic development—a sentiment with which I agree. It allows us to capture in economic strategy our commitment to wellbeing, and I welcome the recent report by the Social Justice and Fairness Commission.

In my opinion, a key feature of economic development for Scotland must be its becoming the most talent-friendly country in the world. We must become much more entrepreneurial in outlook and in practice, and we must encourage the type of entrepreneurial activity that supports our climate change and environmental ambitions. Women must be at the heart of that.

There is also a qualitative richness to our society that is part of our ambitions. I have a long-standing interest in music and was heartened by the ideas involving music in our manifesto. Music not only enriches our lives but develops cognitive capacity in children. The arts also contribute a great deal in terms of gross value added, which can often be overlooked, and—let us face it—music brings us joy.

Whether in music or in manufacturing, financial services or tourism, people and skills are at the heart of everything. That is why I welcome the ambition to put skills at centre stage, particularly for young people, as we move out of the pandemic. We can go further, however. It is time that we moved beyond ideas of skill competence and embraced the pursuit of excellence. It is time that we stopped limiting our ambitions by comparing ourselves mainly with the rest of the UK. We should be in the forefront of international benchmarking. We should be fully engaging with international movements such as WorldSkills just as we want to retain the full benefits of international programmes such as Erasmus.

In addition to our domestic ambitions, we need to think about how Scotland is positioned and seen far beyond our borders. I have been involved in researching Scotland’s business diaspora, communicating with more than 1,000 business leaders in 74 countries. A key positive feature of Scotland the brand includes having a reputation for fair dealing, for being trustworthy and for having a strong ethical business environment.

Those positive qualities need to be not only safeguarded but developed. They need our focus more than ever, given the trashing of values by the Tories in Westminster. Dependence on Westminster is a dead weight holding back our ambitions, and we must be up to the challenge of standing by the rights of the people of Scotland to safeguard our own future.

The most successful countries in the world are countries of a similar size to Scotland, whether we measure that in terms of economic development, being the least corrupt countries or having the happiest citizens. Unlike Scotland, they are independent. This is therefore no time to limit our ambitions. I cannot and will not accept a paucity of ambition for Scotland. It is time we too joined the international community of independent nations, and I am looking forward to putting my heft behind doing everything I can for Scotland and my constituents in Falkirk East.