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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
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.
Displaying 728 contributions
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 4 May 2023
Murdo Fraser
So, it is a work in progress.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 4 May 2023
Murdo Fraser
Okay. In light of that, then, the interim question for the committee is the state of Scotland’s readiness, in your view, should we have another pandemic. Let us say that next year—perish the thought—another pandemic comes along. Are we now in a better place to handle a pandemic than we were before Covid? If not, what more need we do to get there?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 4 May 2023
Murdo Fraser
I just want to follow that up, if I may. Clearly, since Covid, we have seen huge pressure on public services, particularly the NHS, and there has been a lot of emphasis on NHS recovery and on catching up with a lot of what was lost during Covid. Is there a risk that, as you say, we take our eye off the ball and think that Covid is done and that we do not need to have that drive?
Perhaps I can slip in a second question. Where is the public’s thinking on that? Have the public basically decided that Covid is done? If we had another pandemic, do you think that we would have quite the same public buy-in that we saw during Covid to, for example, restrictions on people’s activities?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 4 May 2023
Murdo Fraser
That was back in December. Have you been following that up with the Scottish Government? You have mentioned that it said that it accepted all your recommendations. Are you aware of the Government taking forward work on them?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 4 May 2023
Murdo Fraser
Yes, of course.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 4 May 2023
Murdo Fraser
Thank you. You have raised lots of issues that I would love to explore further, but I appreciate that my time is up, and I am sure that other members will come in on that.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 20 April 2023
Murdo Fraser
I move to item 2, under which the committee will be invited to choose a new convener.
The Parliament has agreed that only members of the Scottish National Party are eligible for nomination as convener of the COVID-19 Recovery Committee. Are there any nominations for the role of convener?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 20 April 2023
Murdo Fraser
Good morning, and welcome to the ninth meeting in 2023 of the COVID-19 Recovery Committee.
As members will be aware, Siobhian Brown has resigned as our convener and member of the committee following her appointment as Minister for Victims and Community Safety. For that reason, I will chair this part of the meeting in my role as deputy convener.
I put on record the committee’s thanks to Siobhian and offer her our congratulations on her appointment. We wish her well in her new role.
We have a new committee member: Stuart McMillan. We have received apologies from him this morning so, instead, we have Ash Regan, who has been appointed as a substitute member. Welcome, Ash.
Ash joins us online, as does Alex Rowley.
Under agenda item 1, I invite Ash to declare any registrable interests that are relevant to the committee’s remit.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 20 April 2023
Murdo Fraser
Okay. Thank you very much. I suppose that I should ask whether there are any other nominations for convener. Are there? No, there are not.
Jim Fairlie was chosen as convener.