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
Session 6: 13 May 2021 to 8 April 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 1943 contributions

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Meeting of the Parliament

Gender-based Violence

Meeting date: 29 November 2023

Sharon Dowey

I am pleased to open this debate for my party, and I welcome the Parliament taking the chance to discuss this crucial issue during the international 16 days of activism against gender-based violence campaign. As the minister has noted, this year’s theme in Scotland is “Imagine a Scotland without gender-based violence”. The sad fact is that we can only imagine that. It is a fantasy at the moment; it is not anywhere close to reality.

Violence against women is everywhere. It is ingrained in society. A recent survey by the NASUWT, the teachers union, revealed that, although male teachers experience more threats of physical violence or abuse, women experience more actual physical violence, and the frequency is substantially higher. That is not acceptable, and we must take action to stop the increasing violence and abuse in our schools.

The police record more than 170 incidents of domestic abuse every single day in Scotland. Almost 65,000 instances of domestic abuse were recorded in 2021-22. Attacks and abuse are common, not rare, for women, and that needs to change.

The Government motion is right that we need a radical social change to prevent this violence. We agree with the motion that there is a need for a system-wide approach. We support the motion’s demand for collective responsibility—for everyone in Scotland to take an active role in preventing violence against women.

That said, we feel that the Government can and should lead the way. It could make changes to the justice system so that it does a better job of protecting women and preventing harm. We have also put forward a suggestion to improve it. My colleague Pam Gosal MSP has proposed a domestic abuse prevention bill that, if enacted, would make Scotland a world leader in tackling domestic abuse. There are many changes that could be made to the justice system to prevent violence against women from occurring in the first place. We hope that the Government will take the spirit of its motion forward and fully consider accepting and introducing that proposal.

However, it is not only on prevention that the Government can make a difference. The system needs to be improved, so that, when violence does occur, there are effective deterrents against future offences. So many acts of violence against women are repeat offences. More than half of all domestic abuse crimes fall into that category. We need to focus on changing criminals’ behaviour to prevent further attacks on women.

Public Audit Committee