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 1148 contributions
|
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Review of the EU-UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Gillian Mackay
That was great. Thank you. Roy, are there similar collaborative things that have become more difficult for your sector with the loss of that interconnectivity and collaboration?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Review of the EU-UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Gillian Mackay
Sarah, what do we need from the current schemes in order to make things better overall for youth work? Is it about making it easier to apply for things or overcoming some of the anecdotal barriers that I am sure you have been hearing about from various organisations, to ensure that we can have vibrant collaboration across youth work organisations, too?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Review of the EU-UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Gillian Mackay
Thank you.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Review of the EU-UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Gillian Mackay
Good morning. I want to ask about how the loss of Erasmus+ has affected research and the overlaps in that regard. Projects such as horizon overlapped quite nicely with Erasmus+ and enabled the exchange of research, especially for honours, masters and PhD students. How is the loss of that affecting the research landscape in higher education? After the initial responses, I will ask Sai to speak about how that is affecting students’ choices of projects and so on.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Review of the EU-UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Gillian Mackay
Are there things on staff mobility that are missing from SEEP? Given that the Scottish Government is in this learning phase, are there things that you would you like the Scottish Government to add in to SEEP to make those things easier?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Review of the EU-UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Gillian Mackay
Absolutely. Does anyone else want to add anything about what they want to see for their own sector, particularly in relation to SEEP?
Meeting of the Parliament
Creative Scotland (Multiyear Funding)
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Gillian Mackay
In recent weeks, the Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee has highlighted how it is all too easy for some production companies to bring crews to Scotland to film projects and then just return to London. Will the cabinet secretary outline how the funding to Screen Scotland will help to strengthen and diversify the range of screen professionals and careers in Scotland?
Meeting of the Parliament
Health and Social Care Workforce
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Gillian Mackay
I will take the intervention from the cabinet secretary.
Meeting of the Parliament
Health and Social Care Workforce
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Gillian Mackay
—which is costing us huge amounts of money. We need to do more on workforce planning to ensure that we do not exacerbate an already—
Meeting of the Parliament
Health and Social Care Workforce
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Gillian Mackay
Many colleagues on all sides of the chamber have made robust contributions to the debate, and the discussion has made it clear that, while there is widespread recognition of the dedication and resilience of those in our health and social care workforce, there is also deep concern about the challenges that they continue to face.
Many Labour members have mentioned a lack of workforce planning, and that is a fair challenge to Government. However, we need multiple workforce plans that address variety and gaps not only across specialties and across some hospitals in the same health boards but across the country. We need a GP workforce plan in the Highlands that is different from what we need in the central belt. If some hospitals are struggling in particular specialties, we need to investigate why. We cannot pretend that we have solved all the issues of poor culture in different bits of the NHS, and we cannot take our eye off that.
One of the most important things that we can do to help NHS workers is give them the tools to be able to work more efficiently and to deliver care in the most accessible place. For example, wait times for treatment in secondary care are far too long, and some people could be helped to stay well for longer before invasive treatment is needed if they were managed properly in the community. However, that would involve more money going to primary care, both to increase the overall GP head count and to enable the diversification of the multidisciplinary team. Utilising technology has to be part of the offer in primary care. It is also well beyond the time when we should be seeing electronic prescribing being used across the NHS. Having GPs signing prescriptions for hours is not a good use of their time, and I assume—I am sure that Dr Gulhane will correct me if I am wrong—that GPs do not enjoy the task either.
We could also take some of the burden off GPs by using the pharmacy first service to its fullest extent. I was grateful—as I am sure that other members were—earlier in the month to have time to speak to the Royal Pharmaceutical Society about how it would like pharmacy first to progress. Having all new pharmacists who graduate being prescribers is fantastic, but there is currently too much risk for pharmacists to be able to fully realise the ambitions of pharmacy first. I had first-hand experience of that a few weeks ago. Because of horrendous travel sickness and being unable to take normal travel sickness tablets, I needed anti-nausea medicine. However, because the pharmacist could not see my notes, and in particular my maternity notes, they did not feel that they could recommend anything, let alone prescribe it. That meant that I had to take up a 15-minute appointment with my GP.
I would be grateful if the cabinet secretary or others looked into whether they are willing to ensure that pharmacists have enough information to be able to prescribe with confidence and provide that further avenue for quick and effective treatment.
