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

Prison Officers Association (68 Is Too Late Campaign)

Meeting date: 18 April 2024

Katy Clark

I congratulate my colleague Pauline McNeill on securing this important debate. The age at which prison officers can retire from the service and collect their pension is currently set at 67, and it is due to increase to 68. While their retirement age continues to be linked to the UK state pension age, prison officers face the real prospect that the age could be increased even further. As it stands, 67 or 68 is too late. It puts prison officers, the colleagues for whom they provide back-up support and the prisoners whom they look after at unacceptable levels of risk.

The omission of prison officers from the list of uniformed services for which a pension age of 60 was agreed to be appropriate, in recognition of the unique toll that such professions take, was a significant error. As Pauline McNeill said, the Hutton review in 2011 concluded:

“for the uniformed services ... where pension age has historically been lower to reflect the unique nature of their work a pension age of 60 is appropriate.”

Prison officers should have had a pension age of 60. We must appreciate that, historically, there have also been lower pension ages in other sectors, such as for staff in psychiatric hospitals. Firefighters, prison officers and the armed forces were all included in 2011, yet prison officers were then excluded.

The current retirement age fails to recognise the unique pressures on prison staff. It is abundantly clear to me from speaking to them and reading the many responses that they provided to the Prison Officers Association’s all-member survey on the issue that the situation is untenable and unsafe. More than 90 per cent of the Prison Officers Association members who were surveyed said that they believe that they will not be able to continue to work until the age of 68, with more than 95 per cent fearing that they will need to leave their job before they reach that age because of the considerable physical and mental health challenges that they face in their work.

In the words of one prison officer,

“By the time we reach 68, we will already be suffering from ill health, hip and knee issues, and the stress that comes from working in the job. Including strokes and heart attacks and high blood pressure. Most of us barely live until our 70’s.”

Another describes how they are already

“struggling to cope”

at the age of 49. The injuries that they frequently receive in the course of their duties

“are taking longer to heal from”,

yet that officer will still be required to work a further 19 years of service before they are permitted to pick up their pension. It is clear that the mental and physical impact of carrying out those roles is incredibly high—and, as Sharon Dowey said, the prison environment that officers work in is becoming increasingly dangerous.

Prison officers work with an ever-expanding prison population and respond to high levels of prisoner violence, which is often instigated by those who are high on psychoactive substances. As has been said, prisons are becoming more dangerous, given the presence of drugs and the increasing numbers of members of organised crime gangs. All of that is coupled with a Scottish Prison Service that is understaffed and overstretched.

I urge the Scottish Government to meet the Prison Officers Association to discuss those issues and, thereafter, to make appropriate recommendations to the UK Government.

13:16

Meeting of the Parliament