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.
More complex keyword searches
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
- a search for “salmon farm” AND “Loch Lomond” will return only results which include both exact phrases
- a search for “salmon farm” NOT “Loch Lomond” will return results for “salmon farm” but exclude results which also include “Loch Lomond”
- a search for “salmon farm” OR “Loch Lomond” will return all results for “salmon farm” and all results for “Loch Lomond” regardless of whether they appear together
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.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
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Displaying 1190 contributions
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Criminal Justice Committee
Correspondence
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Pauline McNeill
Okay, I will wait to see what the Wise Group says.
Criminal Justice Committee
Correspondence
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Pauline McNeill
Are members satisfied with the response? It took one half-hour meeting with the Wise Group for the matter to be raised with us, and I presume that it was not a one-off issue, or the Wise Group would not have raised it. I find it hard to believe that the issue is not being picked up, because it is quite a problem. The letter tells us that, on a Friday,
“the prison healthcare team would write a prescription for the patient to cover a week or so of opioid substitute treatment until the CAT team can pick the patient up.”
That is so lax.
Criminal Justice Committee
Correspondence
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Pauline McNeill
I am not really content with the response because, to me, it is an admission—I do not need the Wise Group to tell me that. The response suggests that the situation is okay. Other people know more about the issue than me—I am just a layperson reading about it—but, surely, if people are prescribed a week’s worth of treatment until the community addiction team can pick up the patient, there could be a gap. That is an admission, is it not? I am just—
Criminal Justice Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 21 September 2022
Pauline McNeill
I welcome these important regulations. Some members of the committee previously questioned the Scottish Legal Aid Board on behalf of practitioners about the fact that there was a disincentive to settle cases early. The regulations are helpful on every level and I support them.
Given what you said to Katy Clark about the pilots being a matter for the SCTS, what is the Government’s role? There must be one if we are being asked to consider it. Who has determined the things that we would expect to see in a pilot, such as how its success is measured? Is that the Government or the SCTS? I am seeking clarification on whether it is all a matter for the SCTS.
Criminal Justice Committee
Police Numbers and New Pension Arrangements
Meeting date: 22 June 2022
Pauline McNeill
Because we do have that.
Criminal Justice Committee
Police Numbers and New Pension Arrangements
Meeting date: 22 June 2022
Pauline McNeill
I have no objection to that, but it has spoken publicly about not answering phone calls on rest days, for example. As with most jobs, there is a lot of stuff that you are not required to do but you do it—it is that goodwill side of things. I do not mind if what you are asking for is written clarification of the new range of actions that it might take.
Criminal Justice Committee
Police Numbers and New Pension Arrangements
Meeting date: 22 June 2022
Pauline McNeill
I agree with the points that have been made so far. As Russell Findlay has said, there is a slightly different perspective from Police Scotland than there is from the Scottish Police Federation. It is important that we establish why. One thing is clear: higher numbers of officers than usual are leaving the police service. Why is that the case?
From what I have read before, the statement in the federation letter that police officers feel “undervalued” came as no great surprise to me. For the life of me, I cannot understand why police officers were not given priority for vaccination during the pandemic, for example. Obviously, that was a matter for the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation but, in reality, I felt that no one was really standing up for police officers.
As we in this committee have been examining, police officers are members of the one profession that cannot walk away from problems, whether they are dealing with 101 calls, mental health issues or crime, and we know that a lot of the calls that police officers deal with are not directly related to crime. That has to be recognised in some way, but it is the loss of experience that concerns me most.
I have looked at the breakdown over the ranks and it is pretty spread across them. There is a sense of urgency about the matter because, if the numbers that we have been given are correct and we lose that level of experience at all those grades, no level of recruitment will compensate for it. The service is already under pressure, so there are service implications that we need to discuss with the Government. The situation must be related to pay and conditions.
As politicians, we have to try to do the right thing. We need to try to retain some of those officers. The federation says that the change to pensions is minor and that police officers could always leave after 30 or 25 years’ service so the change is not the reason why they are leaving. If that is correct, there is a duty on the Government to make some inroads into pay and conditions that would persuade some of those officers to stay, because, if they do not stay, we will have real service issues in the police.
Criminal Justice Committee
Police Numbers and New Pension Arrangements
Meeting date: 22 June 2022
Pauline McNeill
Do you mean the ranks of those who are planning to retire?
Criminal Justice Committee
Scottish Biometrics Commissioner: Draft Code of Practice
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
Pauline McNeill
I have a supplementary question about something that Dr Plastow said earlier.
It surprised me when you said that local authorities hold most of the biometric data; that was news to me, I have to say. I am sure that the answer is obvious—maybe it relates to the delivery of services—but could you expand on why that would be?
