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.
Filter your results Hide all filters
Displaying 711 contributions
|
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 21 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
Just a small one for a Tuesday morning.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Scrutiny of NHS Boards (NHS Ayrshire and Arran, NHS Borders and NHS Forth Valley)
Meeting date: 21 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
For context, I point out that it was just in the past 24 hours that the psychological therapy staff member to whom I referred was in touch about staff having to work unpaid hours because they are so concerned about patients.
I am slightly concerned about what we will do until the new staff who have been recruited are actually in post, given the lag that often comes with recruitment. I think that your submission mentioned 12 weeks, in that regard.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
Obviously, among the other barriers for women coming out of university is when they go into a working environment and have to establish new routines, as is the case when they go into a different working environment and must establish a new routine. Everyone at the table would probably say that our current employment is definitely a barrier to our getting out and getting active. Would four-day weeks, flexible working and things like that provide more space to mothers, women with caring responsibilities and those of us who are just plan busy, in order that we could get out and prioritise our health a bit more?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
I agree. It is key that we tackle the big structural issues as well as individual behavioural issues. That comes down to the planning side and to the employment side.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
You mentioned changing facilities. What else do you think could be done to improve facilities? Some activities in Falkirk, for example, take place in the high schools after the school day has finished, so the lights are often off in the rest of the school, and it is quite an oppressive environment to walk into when it is mostly in the dark. Are there any other examples of ways that we could make the buildings better for women to participate?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
To what extent are you sympathetic to extending the PSC’s remit to include acting as the voice of staff? Do you agree that widening the remit could enable the PSC to get a clearer picture of patient safety concerns, given the different ways in which such concerns are raised, or do you think that it would risk adding duplication or potentially streamlining the remit across all those different ways?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
Paul Sweeney was just talking about exercise being seen as a punishment and how, with influencers and so on, we do not want that to become a thing for young women and teenage girls. However, there is still the older cohort of young women for whom, in the early noughties and so on, that was the reality of physical exercise and activity. Many of us shied away from exercise and organised team sport for those punishment-related reasons. Many of those women will now feel that they should know what physical activity and sport they enjoy doing.
How can we reverse that damage and give that age group opportunities—without stigma—to come back to physical activity and take up new things of the sort that they shied away from when they were younger?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
Given that, as you have just mentioned, minister, the remit is slightly wider than that of the Patient Safety Commissioner for England, do you have any concerns about duplications on the medicine side of things and between the roles of the two commissioners? Do you think that the role for the new commissioner for Scotland is realistic, given its breadth and potential workload?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
A part of the inquiry that I am interested in is how we build a movement toward sport for life, which is probably difficult to do for the age group that you were looking at. How can we better facilitate changes in activities that naturally happen during people’s lives—such as switching from one sport to another? Can we focus, in particular, on where following pathways into elite sport comes in for those young people in late primary school and early secondary school? Also, how do we ensure that they have the skills to be able to go out for a run or go to the gym, which are the physical activities that most people do weekly?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
They are using it for overall wellbeing.
