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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
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.
Displaying 3405 contributions
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Meeting date: 23 September 2021
Sue Webber
For all the other organisations with depleted reserves and no financial resilience, that is often where some small capital investment would have taken place. Ms Davis, is that relevant to Screen Scotland?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Meeting date: 23 September 2021
Sue Webber
I will make an observation. It has been great to hear some of those examples, but they all seem to be focused on the elder end of the population—one of the examples given was about dementia. I suppose that what I am asking about with regard to health and wellbeing is how we level up the agenda for those in deprived areas and how work in the sector can provide a springboard for people in an abusive environment and give them the confidence to leave. That is the longer-term issue that I am trying to get at. We should be trying to rescue people earlier in their lives instead of trying to treat their diseases at the end of them. As I have said, though, it was great to hear some of those examples, especially with regard to dementia, so thank you very much.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Meeting date: 23 September 2021
Sue Webber
You have answered some of the questions that I was going to ask in responding to other members, but I have a follow-up question relating to the fact that your organisation has no capital budget. We have just heard from Mr Ruskell about the renewal programmes that are needed for the industry and the sector. How will the lack of capital impact your ability to kick-start that renewal?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Meeting date: 23 September 2021
Sue Webber
How I frame my question will come as no surprise, as I am moving to the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee. At that committee, it was mentioned that every committee should take a health approach when considering how things are assessed and how funding is allocated.
My question is for Fiona Sturgeon Shea. Your submission has a section called “The impact of the performing arts”. That refers to health and wellbeing, which is great to see. Have you ever measured that? If you can demonstrate the health and wellbeing benefit that your sector brings, have you tried to translate that into a case for more funding? Will you explain more about the tangibles that are being realised in relation to health and wellbeing?
09:15Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 22 September 2021
Sue Webber
I am sorry, Presiding Officer, but that caught me a bit and I welled up just there.
We have heard that our Ambulance Service is at breaking point. There can be no doubt that the Scottish NHS is in crisis and that the SNP is to blame, not the pandemic. The SNP has ignored the warning signs for years. As Jackie Baillie outlined earlier, all the concerns of stakeholders—unions, patients and healthcare professionals—have been ignored, resulting in unnecessary deaths. The failures are systemic—they are not pinch points, as Clare Adamson said. The SNP has dithered and taken far too long to respond to the crisis.
Action must be taken; the Scottish Conservatives are calling on the SNP to provide an emergency funding package and publish a detailed strategy to maximise the use of military staff to tackle the crisis. Every day, we read about cases of long waits for ambulances that sometimes lead to needless deaths and the kind of heartbreaking stories that we just heard from my colleague Craig Hoy.
The Scottish Government has requested the support of the British Army in tackling Scotland’s ambulance crisis. Although we welcome that request being made, it should have happened already; that just exposes the SNP’s shambolic handling of Scotland’s health service. In addition, firefighters and taxi services have now been drafted in to help the Scottish Ambulance Service. However, even after Humza Yousaf’s statement to the Parliament yesterday, Unite the union warned that drafting in the army and firefighters as drivers “will not be enough” to cope with the crisis. Further, my colleague Meghan Gallagher highlighted the cabinet secretary’s hypocrisy in announcing that taxi drivers will now be recruited to help transport patients to hospital for their appointments: those are the same taxi drivers who were hung out to dry during lockdown.
The pandemic has exposed the many deep-rooted weaknesses that existed in our health service long before we heard of Covid and that are due to the SNP’s mismanagement. The deep-rooted workforce crisis was mentioned by Mr Cole Hamilton in his speech. Our healthcare professionals have worked in those extreme conditions for years, juggling staff and equipment shortages, just to keep patient services going. Although there has rightly been a focus on tackling Covid in our health service, other illnesses and diseases cannot simply be forgotten about. The number of excess deaths in Scotland is tragic, and my thoughts are with those who have lost a loved one.
Yesterday, Nicola Sturgeon finally admitted that the NHS is in crisis, but Ms Sturgeon and Mr Yousaf would not confirm when an NHS winter plan would be published. It should have formed an integral part of any NHS Scotland remobilisation plan, but it has not. We are calling on the SNP-Green Government to shelve plans for £15 million in “efficiency savings”—that is not the same as cuts; they have been requested to make “efficiency savings”—in the Ambulance Service and instead announce a series of actions to tackle the crisis, including an emergency funding package that focuses on saving lives. The SNP needs to develop a real plan of action to fully remobilise our NHS, fund our Ambulance Service properly and bring waiting times back under control. Although that will be a challenge for the SNP, it is about time that we got some detail and not just soundbites.
The Scottish Conservatives will vote against the SNP amendment, and I urge Labour to vote for our amendment—laying out some of the questions that we need answers to from the Scottish Government—to strengthen Jackie Baillie’s motion.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
Sue Webber
Earlier, we heard that all policy should be focused on healthcare, and we have heard from members of the panel that workforce planning should come before a remobilisation plan. We have also heard about the diverse careers that are available to people in health and social care—including dentistry; I will not ignore that one.
My question is for Sue Robertson, given that we have a short timeframe. Is the cap on Scottish young people getting into medical schools and universities in Scotland negatively affecting long-term recruitment and our ability to create a sustainable workforce plan?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
Sue Webber
I am a councillor at the City of Edinburgh Council and my salary is donated in full via the give-as-you-earn scheme. I own 100 per cent of the issued share capital of MEDinburgh Ltd, which was a company involved in healthcare sales and marketing. It was deregistered on Companies House at the weekend and has not traded since May 2021.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
Sue Webber
There is a lot of synergy in what we have heard about tackling health inequalities. I am interested in what Professor Burns said about current policies focusing on a top-down approach and the need to focus on a bottom-up approach if we are to help young people when they are in difficulties and prevent their early death from suicide, violence, drugs or alcohol. We live in a world of finite resources, and we want to focus on a bottom-up approach, so what do we do about the top-down approach, because we cannot be everywhere? Right now, our resources are going towards tackling waiting lists, and hip and knee replacements are for the older generation, but you said that we need to focus on supporting the young. How do we square that with the public? How best should we do that?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
Sue Webber
I have a quick follow-up question. Professor Burns, you spoke about how difficult it is to get the data. In the example you gave, members of front-line staff showed a lot of initiative and did some digging around. In terms of data sharing, how important is it for us to have systems that talk to one another?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
Sue Webber
We went into this public health crisis with a pre-existing mental health crisis. An obvious solution would be to have more people who are familiar with recognising mental health issues and providing early support. Recent mental health stats make for grim reading. Almost 1,700 children have been waiting more than a year to start treatment, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists has warned that the number of child and adolescent mental health psychiatrists has fallen in the past year. There is a struggle to recruit people in West Lothian, where waiting times have spiralled—from being a year to being open ended. Does the First Minister agree that people must receive support before they reach crisis point? If so, what is being done now to provide support?