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 (Hybrid)

National Health Service Recovery Plan

Meeting date: 1 June 2021

Audrey Nicoll

It is truly an honour to be elected to this special place, as our nation begins its recovery from Covid-19. I express my grateful thanks to my campaign team, to my loving family, to activists and to all my constituents in Aberdeen South and North Kincardine. I pay special tribute to Maureen Watt—the former first Minister for Mental Health—for her lifetime commitment to the constituency. She will be a very hard act to follow.

I will shamelessly big up Aberdeen South and North Kincardine, which is home to a thriving food and drinks industry, higher education, innovation and stunning coastlines. It is also home to a global energy sector. However, that sector is now experiencing a significant downturn, which places jobs and livelihood at risk. That situation has been compounded by the pandemic and by a disastrous Brexit. It has created a perfect storm, which has had a profound effect on many people—specifically, on their mental health.

Following a 31-year policing career, I joined the school of nursing, midwifery and paramedic practice at Robert Gordon University, delivering nurse education across the health and policing intersect. Never did I imagine, as I lectured to my first-year students on global health challenges, that, weeks later, they would be facing the prospect of their first placements on the front line of such a challenge. I pay tribute to them all, to all NHS staff, and to all my colleagues who returned to the front line. I pay tribute to former colleagues in the emergency services—in particular, those in Police Scotland, who had to balance daily law enforcement duties with using emergency Covid legislation and responding to the growing demand from mental health distress.

I am pleased to focus my first speech on mental health and to speak in support of the motion. Even the most resilient of us felt the mental health impact of the pandemic. However, for young adults, those on low incomes, and others, the impact was significant, especially in cases in which access to care, treatment and psychological therapies was curtailed. The mental health transition and recovery plan builds on work that is already under way in response to Covid-19, and I welcome the range of engagement that informed its priorities. I am pleased that addressing CAMHS waiting times will be prioritised and that programmes such as distress brief interventions will be rolled out.

In what is dementia awareness week, many of my constituents will welcome the commitment to ensuring equitable access to mental health support for older people. I very much hope that mental health will be at the centre of the NHS recovery plan that is mentioned in the motion.

Public service is what I know; it is who I am. Over many years, I have seen health and social care converge to make people’s lives better every day. A national care service is a turning point in our commitment to social care. It is an investment for us, not a burden on us, which offers the opportunity to deliver high-quality, accessible care that is designed around people’s rights and needs.

People in my constituency and across Scotland answered the call to action in the dark days of the pandemic. The Inchgarth Covid-19 support project, Community Food Initiatives North East—the CFINE food bank—Cove Woodland Trust and others all played their part in supporting mental wellbeing. I give them my commitment that I will work as hard as I can, across the Parliament and with the cabinet secretary, to support the Scottish Government to deliver the actions in the mental health recovery plan and in the ambitious NHS recovery plan that is at the heart of the motion.

15:46