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.

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Dates of parliamentary sessions

Session 1: 12 May 1999 to 31 March 2003
Session 2: 7 May 2003 to 2 April 2007
Session 3: 9 May 2007 to 22 March 2011
Session 4: 11 May 2011 to 23 March 2016
Session 5: 12 May 2016 to 4 May 2021
Current session: 13 May 2021 to 24 March 2026

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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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Displaying 3261 contributions

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Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]

Hearing Care (Age-related Hearing Loss)

Meeting date: 28 May 2025

Douglas Lumsden

It is good to hear that the Government is still committed to community audiology. Can the minister give a timescale for when that change will start to happen?

Getting access to the service initially is only one issue; the follow-up is also missing. I speak to many people who have NHS hearing aids, but they never go back to get them checked. That is something else that we are missing out on.

Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]

Hearing Care (Age-related Hearing Loss)

Meeting date: 28 May 2025

Douglas Lumsden

I congratulate my colleague Sharon Dowey on securing the debate, although I feel that it is a debate that we should not be having. We should not be in the situation that we are in now.

The system that we have in place is cruel. Audiology is in crisis. Imagine saying to an elderly person, “I’m sorry, but we’re not going to be able to see you for two years.” We in the chamber can all recognise how inhumane that would be, but the waiting times in NHS Grampian, for example, show that people are having to wait for two years before they get an assessment and then wait longer to get a hearing aid.

As Christine Grahame points out, all that leads to social isolation and links to dementia. There is also an impact on family and community settings. I imagine that people can only say “Pardon?” once or twice before they withdraw from engaging in conversation altogether. The issue should be looked at as soon as possible.

The answer is clear and has been accepted by all: we need to get people out of a hospital setting. Ninety-four per cent of people with hearing loss have uncomplicated adult-onset hearing loss that is suitable for community treatment. At present, those patients compete for the limited capacity that is available to treat children and adults with sudden onset hearing loss and specified comorbidities, who have to be treated in hospital.

There is absolutely a need for intensive audiology in major hospital settings, but the specialists involved should be reserved for the 6 per cent of cases that involve traumatic hearing loss or child hearing loss from birth. However, just now, so much of that resource is being spent on people who should be not in a hospital setting but in community settings instead.

As Sharon Dowey pointed out, we already have a solution in our communities. Companies such as Specsavers, which I visited on Friday—I even had a hearing test done—already provide that service. As we have said, we already do community eye care so, surely, we should just replicate that for hearing.

A couple of months back, I met Neil Gray and Jenni Minto, and the issue was one thing that I spoke to them about, because I had raised questions on it. I thank them for that time.

NHS Grampian would be an ideal place for a pilot on community audiology. There are huge waiting times and a real need for something to be done. I urge the Government to take on the seriousness and urgency of the issue and move with pace, because we are talking about mainly elderly people who might be reaching the end of their lives. We need to look after them and make sure that they can communicate with everyone else as much as possible.

17:51