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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Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
International Day of the Midwife
Meeting date: 4 May 2022
Tess White
It is an honour to speak in the debate. This is my tribute to the extraordinary midwives in Scotland, in the UK and around the world—including my own sister, Cath, who has been a midwife for some 40 years. She says that she was “born a midwife”. For Cath, midwifery was a calling, and I know that it will forever remain a part of her, as it is for many midwives.
There is a remarkably special bond between women and their midwives. From antenatal appointments to the delivery room and the early postpartum period, midwives and the women in their care navigate the journey to new motherhood together. It is a truly unique partnership, and the Covid-19 pandemic brought that into sharp relief as pregnant women accessed antenatal services without the support of their partners. For many women, their midwives were all that they had.
Midwives provide care to mother and baby from those early weeks of pregnancy to the post-birth period, but they do so much more. It is a highly skilled profession, but their value too often goes unrecognised. They listen, they offer emotional support, they facilitate and they advocate. They see women at their most vulnerable and at their most empowered.
The journey is not always straightforward. Midwives help to bring new life into the world, but they also bear witness to the fragility of life. Debilitating pregnancy symptoms, complications during pregnancy, the devastating emotional and physical aftermath of baby loss, difficulties during and after delivery—those are just some of the profound and distressing challenges that a midwife must contend with.
During my own pregnancy, I had pre-eclampsia—a condition that affects more than 2,500 pregnancies in Scotland every year. My midwives spotted the signs and intervened. They saved my life and they saved my son’s life. I am eternally grateful to them for their wonderful and professional care.
Midwifery can be rewarding work, but it is often highly pressured and stressful. The past two years have been extremely difficult for midwives. They have continued to provide exceptional care to pregnant women and new mothers not just in hospital, but in the community, visiting new families in their homes, carrying out newborn check-ups and providing breastfeeding support at the height of the pandemic.
The Royal College of Midwives recently surveyed its members on their experiences in the workplace. The full results of that survey will be published next week, but a preview of its findings makes for alarming reading. Midwifery is “near breaking point”; three in four RCM members are considering leaving their posts; 88 per cent reported experiencing work-related stress; and 92 per cent worked without breaks over the past 18 months. Only 6 per cent of RCM members believe that their workplace is consistently safely staffed.
For the health and wellbeing of midwives, for the student midwives whom they train and for mothers and their babies, I implore the Scottish Government to respond to those findings. The Scottish Government’s five-year plan for maternity and neonatal care in Scotland, “The best start: five-year plan for maternity and neonatal care”, emphasises:
“The health, development, social, and economic consequences of childbirth and the early weeks of life are profound, and the impact, both positive and negative, is felt by individual families and communities as well as across the whole of society.”
Midwives have issued a clarion call. I do hope that the Scottish Government will act.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Future Parliamentary Procedures and Practices Inquiry
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Tess White
Yes, please.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Future Parliamentary Procedures and Practices Inquiry
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Tess White
Thank you. That is helpful and clear. I will follow that up with a final question. Do you say that for reasons of transparency and robust scrutiny?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Future Parliamentary Procedures and Practices Inquiry
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Tess White
Good morning. I think that Mr Naughten has just answered this question, but I would like to go to Mr Vermeylen. Can you share with us your high-level view on the philosophical question about the impact of hybrid proceedings on openness and transparency in a representative democracy?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Future Parliamentary Procedures and Practices Inquiry
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Tess White
Okay—perfect.
Mr Naughten, will you give your philosophical view on that question of representative democracy and hybrid proceedings?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Future Parliamentary Procedures and Practices Inquiry
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Tess White
Thank you. That is very good and clear.
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Technology Sector
Meeting date: 19 April 2022
Tess White
The Logan review highlights that on average in any given year, 84 per cent of students studying higher computing science are male. What action is the Scottish Government taking to address the chronic gender imbalance in computing science at school level, which has resulted in a huge loss of talent in the workforce pipeline for tech start-ups?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
General Question Time
Meeting date: 31 March 2022
Tess White
The Scottish Affairs Committee’s recent report “Airports in Scotland” concluded that the public funding received by Glasgow Prestwick Airport Limited
“has ensured there is not a level playing field across airports in Scotland, leading to a distortion in the market”.
What is the Scottish Government’s response to that conclusion? Can the minister provide any more information about the future of Prestwick airport?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
General Question Time
Meeting date: 31 March 2022
Tess White
To ask the Scottish Government when it last met representatives of the aviation industry to discuss the sector’s recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and what issues were discussed. (S6O-00952)
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Covid-19 Update
Meeting date: 15 March 2022
Tess White
It has emerged that the vaccination passport scheme has cost the taxpayer almost £7 million. That is more than 10 times the originally projected cost of £600,000. Can the First Minister account for how the costs were allowed to balloon like that? Does the Scottish Government believe that that represents value for money for the taxpayer?
