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 3405 contributions

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Meeting of the Parliament

Supporting Carers (Cost of Living)

Meeting date: 18 May 2022

Sue Webber

There is still an impression that Labour supports a national care service. With that, I will carry on with my speech.

The message from service users and people with lived experience is clear: it is local services that they want; it is local services that can adapt to the diverse nature of their needs; and it is local services and third party organisations that we should focus on and invest in. They are delivering the services that people want.

Labour supports the plans for a national care service, despite organisations such as the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and the Fraser of Allander Institute voicing serious concerns.

The SNP’s plans amount to a blatant power grab. Costly new legislation and centralised structures are not the solution. That is why the Scottish Conservatives would offer a local care service, which would protect individual choice and individual control.

Meeting of the Parliament

Supporting Carers (Cost of Living)

Meeting date: 18 May 2022

Sue Webber

Not at the moment.

Our local care service would include a local care guarantee, which would ensure that support was delivered as close as possible to the people who need it, especially in rural and island communities.

We want positive action to be taken. We would give further powers to the Care Inspectorate to drive up standards of local care. A wider scope of powers should be considered to promote sustained improvement of poor care services over time.

We would build minimum pay and terms and conditions into commissioning and procurement, as the Feeley review recommended. We would make care a rewarding career path and would ensure that commissioned services rewarded length of service and positive job performance with pay progression and development of the skills base and responsibilities.

We would institute rigorous workforce planning for the future. A robust, transparent data set to underpin that work can be developed without a national care service. Ours would be not merely a workforce plan that was affordable, but one that was based on forward capacity planning carried out by people who deliver the services and those who access them.

We would improve the carers allowance and extend payments. We would do that by introducing a taper rate so that carers do not lose 100 per cent of their allowance if they earn £1 more than the £128 per week limit. We would also extend payments of carers allowance to up to six months after bereavement and would allow carers in full-time education to continue to receive the carers allowance.

We would amend the Carers (Scotland) Act 2016 to give unpaid carers automatic rights to support for breaks from caring. Right now, only around 3 per cent of unpaid carers receive statutory support for breaks from caring.

The UK Government’s health and social care levy delivers a clear union dividend. In 2024-25, Scotland will benefit from an additional £1.1 billion because of the health and social care levy. We are calling on the Scottish Government to guarantee that that fund will be passed on and ring fenced in full.

Although we welcome the UK Government’s cut in fuel duty, we consider that the mileage reimbursement for care workers should be temporarily increased by 5p per mile, based on the cost of fuel, as has been agreed for NHS workers. Most importantly, it should be funded by the Scottish Government.

Meeting of the Parliament