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 892 contributions

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Meeting of the Parliament

First Minister’s Question Time

Meeting date: 14 September 2023

Foysol Choudhury

Police Scotland recently released a report highlighting that this year’s funding allocation represents a real-terms reduction. As a result, the number of police officers has been reduced to 16,600 in Scotland. At the same time, the number of calls being made to Police Scotland is reportedly only increasing. Can the First Minister advise what action the Scottish Government is taking to ensure that Police Scotland is suitably funded to deal with this demand?

Meeting of the Parliament

Child Poverty

Meeting date: 12 September 2023

Foysol Choudhury

I thank Bob Doris for bringing this important issue to the chamber.

Tackling child poverty was outlined as the national mission of the Scottish Government, yet the most recent figures show that one in four children continues to live in poverty. Children who grew up in poverty will continue to experience the far-reaching consequences of a childhood lived below the poverty line.

For many children, growing up in poverty will impact on their physical and mental health and wellbeing. It will affect their education and ability to learn and develop. It can significantly reduce their life opportunities and experiences. The Scottish Government needs to address that and ensure that support for children is available across all areas where poverty might have affected their lives.

Children who grow up as part of minority groups, such as disabled households, black and minority ethnic households and single-parent households, are disproportionately affected by poverty. Thirty-nine per cent of children from black or minority ethnic families live in poverty in Scotland. [Interruption.] No, I will not give way to members, as my colleagues have taken enough interventions and I have a lot to cover.

A recent report by the cross-party group on poverty outlined that those from black and minority ethnic communities will also face greater poverty-related stigma than other groups. The Scottish Government’s approach to tackling child poverty must address that.

Children born into an impoverished area will eventually face significant hurdles in their lives. In 2019, it was reported that the life expectancy of a boy born in Muirhouse was 13 years less than a boy born in neighbouring Cramond. That is still the reality for many children living in poverty, and we have yet to see the Scottish Government make any significant improvement to that situation.

Inequality of access is also a major issue affecting children living in poverty. [Interruption.] I am sorry—I will not be taking any interventions, as I have a lot to get through.

In several communities in the Lothian region, there are incredibly long waiting lists for council-run swimming lessons due to demand outstripping the supply of swimming pool facilities and teachers. Private lessons are very expensive and are simply beyond the budget of many lower-income families. That means that children are losing out on vital water safety skills and opportunities to have fun and to socialise with friends. Once again, it is lower-income families who are losing out.

The Scottish Government must do more. When such high levels of children with parents under the age of 25 are living in poverty, the Government must do more to support those young parents and to ensure that the welfare system does not fail them. It must do more to combat the disproportionate effect that poverty has on BAME and other minority groups. It must do more to achieve its national mission and to eradicate child poverty.

17:55

Meeting of the Parliament

Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete

Meeting date: 7 September 2023

Foysol Choudhury

West Lothian Council has been working for several years to identify and address the problem of RAAC in schools in its area. It has now been waiting nine months for an announcement on learning estate investment programme funding to find out whether its bid for a new school in Livingston has been successful. Can the cabinet secretary advise when an announcement will be made on that funding, so that councils can actually begin to address the problem with RAAC in schools?

Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee