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

Dying in the Margins Project

Meeting date: 16 November 2023

Stephanie Callaghan

I, too, congratulate Paul O’Kane on securing this debate. The subject has affected many of us deeply. I am not often distracted during First Minister’s question time, but that certainly happened to me today when I was thinking about this debate.

After visiting “The Cost of Dying” photography exhibition, I felt compelled to speak in this debate. Colleagues have already raised serious issues around energy bills, social security support, timely access to affordable housing, and adaptations. I trust that the minister will address those when she speaks.

Seeing the dying in the margins project’s exhibition was a deeply moving experience. It provided a profound visual insight into the harsh realities that people who are living in poverty face at the end of their lives. I am sure that I am not the only one who fought back tears and felt quite overwhelmed by the struggles that the participants faced, and I was also humbled by the resilience that they showed. I thank Marie Curie, the University of Glasgow and especially Dr Emma Carduff, Dr Sam Quinn and Ellie, whom I spoke to that day. Most of all, however, I thank all those who shared their intimate stories and experiences because they wanted to make life better for others. I thank them for that brave and compassionate act, for their insight and for creating such a powerful legacy.

We bear a responsibility to ensure that every citizen enjoys a fulfilling and dignified life right up until the end. However, years of harsh austerity and the cost of living crisis have made a really harsh narrative for the most vulnerable in our society, who face a disproportionate consequence of systematic poverty. The stark reality is highlighted by the “Population mortality impacts of the rising cost of living in Scotland” research that was published in the British Medical Journal. It mentions a projected rise in the number of premature deaths, with the rate being four times higher in deprived areas. If we are to fundamentally change people’s experiences in the final years of life, we must do more to end poverty in every other year of life.

We have heard quite a bit about the costs of terminal illness. It could happen to any of us, but the lived experience of those who are in poverty in their final moments is starkly different. We have heard a lot about the costs that are associated with terminal illness and how it pushes families into further hardship. One of the quotes that I remember from the exhibition was from Amandeep, who said, “Do we heat our house up or do we eat food? It’s very much getting to that point now.” His decision to stay at home created a significant financial burden for his mum, who became his full-time carer. It is not unusual that family members need to reduce their work hours or quit their jobs to become full-time caregivers, and when that loss of income is compounded by the additional costs of terminal illness, there is a double burden on families.