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 3138 contributions
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Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Gillian Martin
I call Sandesh Gulhane, who has a quick question, and I see that Tess White, who is online, wants to come in, too.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Gillian Martin
I thank Dr Connon for the power of work that she has put into the report and for spending so much time with us this morning to answer our questions. It was a very useful start to our scrutiny process.
We will take a 10-minute break to allow for a change of witnesses.
09:55 Meeting suspended.10:07 On resuming—
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Gillian Martin
If any online panel members want to come in, they just have to type R in the chat box. There we go: Professor Needham wants to come in, I think. Maybe we should let people know that I see “Professor Catherine” on screen, but there are two Professor Catherines. If I mix up the two of you, I apologise—the surname is just not coming up.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Gillian Martin
I have a question on ethical commissioning. I presume that the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill seeks to ensure that there are fair work principles and standards across everything. Obviously, local decision making will still happen for all the reasons that have been outlined, but there will be standards for the care that people are offered, fair work and fair pay principles, and a structure akin to that of the NHS. Is that really going to underpin all the local decision making?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Gillian Martin
I will bring in two of our witnesses, and we will then have to wrap up. Professor Needham is waiting very patiently. I will then will bring in Professor Glasby.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Gillian Martin
Thank you. We have run over time, and we have to move on to our next agenda item.
I thank all our panellists—those who are online and those who are here in person—for their time this morning. Their evidence has certainly given us a lot of food for thought as we continue our scrutiny of the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Petitions
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Gillian Martin
The third item on our agenda is consideration of four public petitions that have been referred to the committee. PE1845 is a petition for an agency to advocate for the healthcare needs of those living in rural Scotland; PE1890 is a petition to find solutions to recruitment and training challenges for rural healthcare in Scotland; PE1915 is a petition to reinstate Caithness County Council and Caithness NHS Board; and PE1924 is a petition to complete an emergency, in-depth review of women’s health services in Caithness and Sutherland.
The Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee referred the petitions to our committee after doing its own scrutiny of them, so that they can be considered as part of our work on health inequalities. Colleagues will remember that we did a substantial review of, and inquiry into, health inequalities. The common theme that runs through all the petitions is rural healthcare, which we routinely address in our scrutiny of the health service and which came up as a particular issue during our health inequalities work.
We need to have a discussion about what to do with the petitions. Some of the petitioners have already met the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, for example—I am talking about the final petition, on an in-depth review of women’s health services. Members will also be aware that the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee has already done some work on the petitions. In fact, we have a member here—David Torrance—who is also on that committee. He might want to tell us about some of the work that has been done.
Before I open up the discussion, there are some options to consider in relation to what we want to do.
The first option is to invite a selection of rural health boards to give evidence on the issues raised in the petitions and to follow that up with either a letter to, or a session with, the cabinet secretary. Obviously, that option will take the most time, and we need to decide whether we have time for that. We will not be able to do that this side of Christmas, because our scrutiny of the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill will take up all our time right up until Christmas.
The second option is to proceed directly to inviting the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care to give evidence on the issues raised in the petitions, given that a lot of evidence has already been taken and we have already done quite a lot of our own scrutiny of rural healthcare in our equalities work. I should point out that the cabinet secretary has already spoken to the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee about the issues that are raised in the petitions.
The third option is to take evidence via correspondence. We could write to rural health boards and the cabinet secretary to seek evidence on the issues.
The fourth option is to close some or all of the petitions.
It would be really helpful to hear from David Torrance about some of the scrutiny work that the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee has already done. This is not revenge for him passing the petitions on to us. I genuinely want to know what level of scrutiny there was at that committee.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Petitions
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Gillian Martin
I believe that only two people support that petition, whereas the other petitions have a lot more substantial support. There is also quite a bit of overlap between the themes in the other three petitions.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Petitions
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Gillian Martin
That is very helpful. Thanks, Gillian.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Petitions
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Gillian Martin
I should mention that we routinely meet health boards, and we can factor into that work quite a lot of the issues from PE1890 and the other petitions. We said that we wanted to do some targeted work on the workforce, particularly in rural areas. That is why we are having the health boards in. We should remember that. I do not want to duplicate work and have an additional session.
You are preaching to the converted, because I am a rural MSP, and everything that has been mentioned is the situation in Aberdeenshire, but it should be remembered that we will be having health boards in anyway, so the petition can feed into the scrutiny that we will be doing in those sessions.
