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 1119 contributions
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Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Healthcare in Remote and Rural Areas
Meeting date: 12 December 2023
Paul Sweeney
Does Nicola Gordon have a perspective on the question?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Healthcare in Remote and Rural Areas
Meeting date: 12 December 2023
Paul Sweeney
You mentioned housing being provided. Can we look at examples that are a good model, relative to other areas?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Healthcare in Remote and Rural Areas
Meeting date: 12 December 2023
Paul Sweeney
When I attended a round table with student nurses a few months ago, a number of them said that, although they were keen to take up placements in remote and rural boards, they often could not do so as they could not secure accommodation and it was too costly for them to move. Does that ring true with the panel? How do we give students and qualified practitioners in a number of disciplines the tools to fulfil positions that they might want to take up in remote boards? I ask Jaki Lambert to start.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Healthcare in Remote and Rural Areas
Meeting date: 12 December 2023
Paul Sweeney
Do panel members have any examples of where digital interventions have worked well to improve access to healthcare in remote areas or in particular boards across Scotland that could be captured and scaled up to become a national standard? Does anyone have any immediate insights on that?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Healthcare in Remote and Rural Areas
Meeting date: 12 December 2023
Paul Sweeney
I want to pick up on the point that has been raised repeatedly about broadband being a physical constraint on access to a lot of critical services and capabilities. For example, I think that there is not a fixed-line broadband connection into certain geographies. Do you feel that the NHS should do more to provide satellite broadband services to all staff to give people the assurance of knowing that they can have access to the basic infrastructure that is required to carry out consultations or to access key services. Is that the sort of thing that might be worth looking at? Perhaps you could offer a perspective on that, Mr Dickson.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Healthcare in Remote and Rural Areas
Meeting date: 12 December 2023
Paul Sweeney
Thank you very much.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Healthcare in Remote and Rural Areas
Meeting date: 12 December 2023
Paul Sweeney
Panellists might be familiar with the work of the University of Glasgow and Marie Curie on the dying in the margins project, which highlighted the reality of terminally ill people dying at home, particularly in poverty and with poor adaptations to their housing situations. What is your experience of how end-of-life needs and wishes are being addressed in rural settings? Are there particular challenges in supporting people in those areas to have the death that they want, challenges that we might not see as much in urban areas, simply because those people do not have the same autonomy of decision making about staying at home in the final stages of life? Does anyone have a particular view on that?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Scottish Housing Regulator: “Annual Report and Accounts 2022-23”
Meeting date: 5 December 2023
Paul Sweeney
Just to be clear on your point, do you agree that the current remit of the Scottish Housing Regulator is inadequate to safeguard community control of assets?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Scottish Housing Regulator: “Annual Report and Accounts 2022-23”
Meeting date: 5 December 2023
Paul Sweeney
I have observed 18 separate regulatory breaches, conflicts of interest and procedural abuses by the interim director and management committee co-optees at Reidvale Housing Association. I and other members of the Parliament have written to you about that today. If a potential transfer partner has breached data protection law by obtaining the personal contact information of a target housing association’s tenants to canvass them, without their explicit consent, with unsolicited text messages and calls, what action will the Scottish Housing Regulator take in that instance?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Scottish Housing Regulator: “Annual Report and Accounts 2022-23”
Meeting date: 5 December 2023
Paul Sweeney
If I may come back briefly, convener, I appreciate the challenges in governance that Mr Walker and Mr Cameron have outlined and which I am sighted on as well, but the fundamental point is that this is about 900 tenements in a highly desirable part of Glasgow with no debt secured against them, and it is unusual for a housing association to have that level of fiscal headroom to raise capital through secured debt against the properties.
Furthermore, there does not seem to be any proactive effort to support the community to improve the governance of the housing association without having to surrender control of the assets.
Also, several professionals who are engaged in community-controlled housing associations across the Glasgow area offered to come in to the housing association to support the restructuring without having to surrender control of the assets to a large national housing group but were denied en bloc by the Scottish Housing Regulator. Those are matters of concern, as I understand it, in terms of co-options on to that board. In the light of that and what you have said today, we should consider how to strengthen protections for community-controlled housing in Scotland.
