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 2388 contributions
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COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Long Covid Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
Jim Fairlie
Welcome to the committee, folks. I will come on to ask about paediatrics but, before I do so, I want to go back a little bit, if that is all right.
Murdo Fraser talked about GPs, and you said this yourself, cabinet secretary. If a GP does not accept that there is an issue with someone who is a long Covid sufferer, they will not have the energy to fight the system. One thing that we keep hearing from long Covid sufferers is that they are drained. If they go to a GP who dismisses them, what is the route for them to get a second opinion? Alternatively, is there a way of compelling GPs to accept that long Covid is actually a condition and that people are suffering from it?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Long Covid Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
Jim Fairlie
Okay. I point out that I am talking about a tiny minority of people, and I am not entirely sure about where we are now with regard to people not getting that.
I will talk about the partnership between the third sector and the NHS. My colleague John Mason and I attended a Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland event in this committee room, and it was excellent. Is there room for you to expand that partnership more as we go forward? Clearly, the NHS is under a huge amount of pressure, and if other areas of society, such as third sector groups, are able to help, surely we would want to do that.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Long Covid Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
Jim Fairlie
I will move quickly on to paediatrics. In your opening remarks, you mentioned children who have long Covid, and some of the most harrowing evidence that we have listened to has come from parents of young kids who have suddenly become completely debilitated. What pathways are available in healthcare services for children with long Covid right now?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Long Covid Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
Jim Fairlie
One of the other gaps that we have heard about relates to the transition of children and adolescents into adult services. Are you doing any work around making sure that the transition is working for young people who go from children’s care into adult care?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Long Covid Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
Jim Fairlie
Is there a consistent offering across Scotland when it comes to educational support for children and young people with long Covid?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Long Covid Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 March 2023
Jim Fairlie
I will move on to theme 6. In my previous life as a farmer, prevention was always better than cure. We are now dealing with the effects of people having been infected with Covid, but how will we stop it continuing to circulate? The convener made the point that only just over 2 million people have taken up the booster. What more can we do? Is it a case of more messaging? How do we get over the vaccine fatigue to remind people that the disease has not gone away and that people are still suffering and dying from it?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 22 March 2023
Jim Fairlie
I have one very quick supplementary on that.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 22 March 2023
Jim Fairlie
I would like to ask about the opportunities in the future rural policy to improve farm incomes and competitiveness. I am bearing in mind one of the things that you said earlier about consumers being squeezed at one end and farmers being squeezed at the other, with a big chunk in the middle. Can the policy affect that? Is the policy a vehicle to do that, or do we need to get the supermarkets in this room to ask them how they are going to pay more to farmers and charge less to consumers?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 22 March 2023
Jim Fairlie
You touched on two things earlier: one was the cost of producing broccoli in Fife and the other was about berries. In my area, in Perthshire, a long-established berry farm has simply pulled the berries out of the ground—we are talking about blueberries here; a high-quality food, a super food. At the moment, it seems that we are undermining the ability of these unsupported sections of the industry to be able to produce the kinds of food that we want our population to eat, while, at the same time, producers are being squeezed, either through labour shortages as a result of Brexit or through the power of supermarkets to bring produce in more cheaply from Peru, for example, which means that the price that our producers will get is so low that it is no longer sustainable.
That comes back to a point that I made earlier. Although we are trying to do many things with this bill, we are missing some areas. We are focusing on this bill but we are missing areas where we should be doing a lot more for the country and for our producers because of stuff that is effectively outside our control.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 22 March 2023
Jim Fairlie
Welcome to the committee, Jonnie.
Before I turn to the opportunities for the farming community from policy reform, I want to ask about your survey. You said that the highest level of anxiety was about future support. The Scottish Government has said:
“no matter what Westminster does the Government in Scotland will maintain direct payments and support our nation’s producers.”—[Official Report, 15 March 2023; c 25.]
I would like to reflect on that. Do you have concerns about what future funding will look like? Ultimately, if, whatever policy we deliver, there is security of funding for future payments, where is the anxiety coming from? Is it the lack of certainty about future payments, is it the lack of direction from the Scottish Government, or is it both?
