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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Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Health Inequalities
Meeting date: 31 May 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
[Inaudible.]—national health service—
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Health Inequalities
Meeting date: 31 May 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
Before I ask my questions, I want to say to Dr Jackson that I am really interested in the development of the national oversight observatory and repository for Scotland, and that it would be great to hear more about that come May next year, when we have more information about it.
My first question is for Claire Sweeney. You talked about linking spending to outcomes, and the importance of community planning partnerships. Are there specific people who should be on community planning partnerships? Are there people who are not on them but should be? Are there links that the community planning partnerships should be making? I know that there is variation across local authorities when it comes to who sits on those partnerships.
As a wee aside, you mentioned measuring the link between spending and outcomes. Does that sometimes get in the way when things are difficult to measure? Does it mean that the focus is not applied in the right way?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Health Inequalities
Meeting date: 31 May 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
I am interested in your mention of the impact of shame and guilt on people’s ability to participate in public life and the huge impact that that has on mental health, which will be a massive issue in our recovery.
Back in January, Mary Glasgow spoke about how brutal and unfair the cut in universal credit was and how it had a huge impact on children and families, not only practically and financially but emotionally. She said that that sent a message about society’s view of people’s needs and created shame and guilt. Often, the media do not help with that perception.
Notwithstanding all the measures that we bring in to address poverty, are there other things that we can do to help people to feel respected and valued, and to remove the shame and guilt that people find so isolating and that have such a bad impact on their mental health?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
How will multiyear funding support better planning?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
We have spoken about the comments of Ruth Binks from Inverclyde Council, about the challenge authorities being pathfinders, about the fact that the workforce has skilled up and about the authorities’ ability to manage PEF money growing year on year. In the evidence that we have taken, we have heard about teachers being able to reach into families, understand them better and understand the impacts of poverty. We have also heard that teachers have independently reached similar understandings of what has worked well for families and what has the most impact.
Do you consider that the pathfinder funding approach was successful? What has worked particularly well? Were there particular challenges? Mr Marra has commented about cuts quite a lot but, if we look at the pathfinder approach, that is not really what has gone on there. He mentioned some personal conversations that he has had, but that was not committee evidence. Was it clear enough from the outset that a pathfinder approach was being taken, or is that perhaps a learning point?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
Mr Dey made some important points about the collaborative working that has developed and really flourished with the RICs at both the local and national levels. Families seem to have had quite a bit of input and there has been close working with teachers and so on. How can we ensure that families continue to influence policy and decision making not just at the local level, but at the national level, too? How do you intend to do that?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Social Care
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
Earlier, you gave us the very good example of Granite Care Consortium—I hope that I got the name right—and front-line staff being able to step up care to prevent people from going into hospital and then to step down that care. How can we measure the effectiveness of our investment in prevention and build that evidence so that we can deliver this right across the board at national level?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Social Care
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
It is a work in progress.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Social Care
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
We have known for quite a long time from the Christie commission report and so on about the shift that needs to be made from critical to preventative care. Indeed, that is something that I think we can all agree on. Have we looked at the level of unmet need and what it would cost to meet it, instead of just looking at how we meet substantial and critical needs? Is there a greater cost in not meeting those needs from the point of view of prevention and keeping people well?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Social Care
Meeting date: 17 May 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
I have a short question to finish up. Has any work been done on, or is there any interest in having, a dashboard of wellbeing indicators from which we can get feedback from individuals on how they are doing? I am stealing that idea from the Education, Children and Young People Committee, which I also sit on. As we have seen from the evidence, data can be heard to measure and it can be difficult to get the information. Is that something that you have looked at or would consider looking at in the future?
