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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Displaying 1560 contributions

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Meeting of the Parliament

First Minister’s Question Time

Meeting date: 2 December 2021

Tess White

Infants under the age of four are being prescribed antidepressants, and the number of 5 to 14-year-olds on antidepressant medication has risen massively in recent years. Those are alarming statistics. It is a hidden mental health pandemic. We know that early intervention and prevention are key. What action is the Scottish Government taking to extend community-based mental health services for children and young people, to support youth work services and to ensure that there is an adequate pipeline of qualified counsellors for schools?

Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)

Covid-19

Meeting date: 30 November 2021

Tess White

The First Minister said that

“vaccination is the best line of defence”,

but yesterday NHS Grampian closed vaccination centres in Aberdeenshire as a result of storm Arwen. Damage and debris are still affecting the road infrastructure in the north-east. Has the Scottish Government made any assessment of the number of people who have been unable to attend vaccination appointments because of the storm and will action be taken to ensure that vaccination centres stay open safely during severe weather this winter?

Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)

Gender-based Violence

Meeting date: 30 November 2021

Tess White

All too often, violence against women and girls takes place in the shadows. The 16 days of activism are so important because they help to shine a light on that most shocking violation of human rights. As parliamentarians, it is our duty to look at the levers that are available to us to prevent such violence, to punish those who perpetrate it and to protect victims from further abuse.

On prevention, we must do more to address the root causes of violence against women. There is a huge amount of work to be done to tackle gender inequality, which remains stubbornly and unacceptably persistent.

On punishment, women who have been victimised must have full confidence in the criminal justice system. Many, sadly, do not. As Audrey Nicoll highlighted, we know that sexual violence is worryingly underreported. According to the most recent Scottish crime and justice survey, only 22 per cent of victims of rape reported it to the police.

Collette Stevenson mentioned Rape Crisis Scotland’s recently published report from the survivor reference group, which describes in stark terms the experience of survivors of rape and sexual crimes as they engaged with the justice system. It highlighted “attitudinal issues” among the police, “feelings of powerlessness” during investigations and “retraumatising” experiences in court—if the case progressed that far. The system is supposed to protect victims, but too often it neglects them.

Earlier this year the Scottish Parliament passed the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021—legislation that, crucially, failed to afford women the same legal protections as other groups have. The working group that is led by Helena Kennedy QC is welcome. As we know, the group is looking separately at how the Scottish criminal justice system deals with misogyny. However, it meets behind closed doors, with no detailed minutes in the public domain, and its deliberations are drip-fed to the media. Women feel as though they have been pushed to the periphery of a process that should have them at its heart.

Lord Bracadale’s review on hate crime, including misogynistic harassment, was published in 2018, and the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act was passed in 2021, but the misogyny and criminal justice in Scotland working group will not report until 2022. Every year we say that more must be done to end violence against women, but it feels as though progress cannot keep up with rhetoric.

One way that we can make progress and protect victims who have been subjected to violence is through implementation of a robust and well-administered victim notification scheme. Last week it emerged that only 37 victims of violent and sexual crimes out of a possible 4,500 had been informed when the offender in their case would be released from prison. It is clear that the current system is not fit for purpose.

The Scottish Conservatives have called for the introduction of whole-life orders for the most heinous of crimes, including violence that is perpetrated against women. It is a call that, I regret to say, other parties have resisted, to date.

The cross-party consensus on eliminating violence against women and girls is to be welcomed, but there is a great deal more that we can and should do to protect their safety. No woman should ever have to live in fear.

17:54