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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Meeting of the Parliament

World Menopause Month

Meeting date: 1 November 2022

Monica Lennon

It really has been an enjoyable debate. Some difficult topics have been covered, but everyone who has spoken has brought a lot of insight and lived experience, and a bit of humour as well. I have given notice that I have to leave before the end of the debate and thank you, Presiding Officer, for allowing that. I apologise that I cannot stay for the minister’s closing remarks, which it would be good to hear.

We have made a good start with the women’s health plan—the first in the UK. There is a lot in there that is positive, as we heard recently at the cross-party group on women’s health, which I chair. We need to keep going on that, and I know that there is commitment to that across the chamber. That is why it is so important to know when we will have a women’s health champion. I am sure that there are plenty of able people who could fill that role.

I congratulate Siobhian Brown on securing the debate. It is important that we do not just let these awareness months and days pass us by. We are having much more open conversations about the menopause and, indeed, the perimenopause. However, just having that talk is not enough.

We know that there is a lot to do, and we have heard about the importance of good-quality time with GPs and in primary care. When I get the chance to speak to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, we talk about medical misogyny. He really gets that phrase now and I think that we all have to work on that. Menopause is a bit like mental health, in that, when we ask people to come forward to get help early, we have to make sure that the resource is there to meet that expectation. That is about supporting the workforce, as well.

As we have heard today, menopause is a workplace issue. We have heard that from a number of colleagues including Carol Mochan, and Mercedes Villalba with her intervention. It is timely that we meet today, because I know that the minister has been at the STUC women’s committee conference, which is important. We are so blessed in Scotland in having fantastic trade union women who are champions in the workplace and who bring us the information so that we can speak in these debates and in our CPGs and committees.

I also give a nod to the all-party parliamentary group on menopause in Westminster. It undertook an inquiry and produced a very good report. It is quite long, so I will not go into it too much, but it makes an important point that I know that colleagues here will agree with, which is that the way in which menopause can affect minority groups including people in the LGBTQ+ community is important. We might have our political differences, but Pam Gosal is an important role model on these issues, by sharing her experience, because we know that many people will be afraid of the menopause. Some people have an easy experience and some do not, and it is important that we break down those barriers.

I thank all colleagues who have shared their experience and, of course, I wish Stephanie Callaghan a good recovery. I think that we have to remind our sisters to take a day off. Life will carry on, so, again, when we talk about good menopause policy in the workplace, it is also about us showing that, actually, it is okay not to be at your work.

Colleagues have been really inclusive in the debate, but in the few seconds that remain I just want to talk about early menopause for those women and people who menstruate whose periods stop before the age of 45. That can also be for reasons that relate to other health conditions. It could be cancer, linked to treatment, or endometriosis. Let’s face it: people are diagnosed with endometriosis far too late on average. That is an issue that I know the minister probably has sleepless nights about, but there is an important commitment to bring that time down from eight and a half years to 12 months by the end of this session of Parliament. That is another issue that we all need to work together on.

I thank Siobhian Brown again for the debate, and I thank all colleagues for their humour and insight.