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 4207 contributions
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Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Non-fatal Strangulation
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
Audrey Nicoll
I will bring in Katy and then come back to you, Fulton, if you still want to ask a question.
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Non-fatal Strangulation
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
Audrey Nicoll
I will bring in Liam Kerr to bring the evidence session to a close with a final question, but, before I do so, I note that I have to leave in a few minutes to attend another commitment. I do not want to curtail the evidence session, because this is a really important discussion, so I will hand over to Liam, our deputy convener, to convene the rest of the meeting.
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Non-fatal Strangulation
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
Audrey Nicoll
That brings us up to time. I thank our witnesses for their contributions, which have given us a really helpful insight into the issue.
It goes without saying that people who have been watching this evidence session might be affected by what has been discussed. I remind everyone that the EmilyTest website, which can be found at www.emilytest.org, includes guidance and training material and is a very useful resource for people to access.
I again thank our panel members. We will have a short suspension for around 10 minutes for a comfort break and a changeover of witnesses.
11:02 Meeting suspended.11:11 On resuming—
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Non-fatal Strangulation
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
Audrey Nicoll
Thank you for that comprehensive overview, which was very helpful.
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Non-fatal Strangulation
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
Audrey Nicoll
Detective Superintendent Brown, we have spoken about DASH, the risk-assessment process that front-line officers complete. Early gathering of accurate and robust information about the circumstances of an incident is crucial, and we have spoken about question 15, which relates to strangulation, choking or suffocation. From a Police Scotland perspective, regardless of whether we ultimately create a stand-alone offence, given the significance of that particular act, is there scope for that question to be expanded or developed so that it is more effective?
11:30Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Non-fatal Strangulation
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
Audrey Nicoll
Our main item of business is an evidence session on non-fatal strangulation, which includes consideration of the issues raised by petition PE2136, in the name of Fiona Drouet, who joins us today. The petition calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to make non-fatal strangulation a stand-alone criminal offence in Scotland.
Non-fatal strangulation is not currently a stand-alone offence in Scotland. Instead, it is prosecuted under a range of criminal offences. As a result, data on the number of offences that have included an element of non-fatal strangulation in Scotland is not readily available.
Since June 2022, non-fatal strangulation has been a stand-alone offence in England and Wales, and legislation creating a new offence of non-fatal strangulation came into effect in Northern Ireland in June 2023.
As members are aware, the Scottish Government’s 2025-26 programme for government commits to carrying out
“a comprehensive assessment of the law in relation to non-fatal strangulation to determine if there is further action that needs to be taken beyond existing provisions in law that could be used to tackle this issue.”
We have two panels of witnesses with us this morning. First, I warmly welcome Fiona Drouet, who lodged the petition and is the chief executive officer and founder of EmilyTest; Fiona McMullen, the operations manager for Advocacy Support Safety Information Services Together; and Professor Cath White, the medical director at the Institute for Addressing Strangulation.
I refer members to papers 1 and 2, and I thank those who provided us with written evidence in advance of today’s session. I intend to allow an hour or so for this panel.
I will begin with a general opening question to get us started. Can you explain to the committee what the mental and physical impacts of non-fatal strangulation can be on victims in the short term and the longer term?
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Non-fatal Strangulation
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
Audrey Nicoll
Fulton MacGregor, do you want to come in with a follow-up to Sharon’s first question?
Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]
European Union-United Kingdom Summit
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Audrey Nicoll
Will the cabinet secretary set out what the main and most damaging points of Brexit have been for Scotland, particularly with regard to the fish processing sector in the north-east, and how, if at all, the agreement that has been reached will ameliorate those harms? Does he agree that, in the extremely uncertain economic and geopolitical environment that we currently live in, it is vital that Scotland has the security, stability and opportunity that comes with membership of the European Union through independence?
Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]
Climate Change Plan Monitoring Report 2025
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Audrey Nicoll
Continuing on that theme, will the cabinet secretary advise how the Scottish biodiversity strategy will build on the steps that Scotland has already taken to address the biodiversity crisis, with particular regard to Scotland’s rivers, which are crucial to our environment and face the triple impact of more intensive flood events, drought events and rising temperatures?
Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]
Secure Care and the Wider Care System
Meeting date: 15 May 2025
Audrey Nicoll
I welcome the minister’s statement and her consistent engagement with the Parliament and the Criminal Justice Committee on the issue. She has been clear before that the issue is not unique to Scotland and is complex. Will the minister therefore set out how our multi-agency approach in Scotland is bringing partners together in supporting the principles of getting it right for every child?
