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 [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Murdo Fraser
Thank you. I think that Professor Peacock indicated that she wants to come in.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Murdo Fraser
Good morning. I want to follow up on the convener’s last question. It sounds as though you have successfully and quickly been able to scale up your work to address issues and to provide the capacity that is required. You have identified the risk to that work continuing. How essential is it that we maintain that level of work? What are the risks to it, in terms of future funding?
Perhaps Mr Gray can go first, as he addressed that point previously.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Murdo Fraser
I welcome Siobhian Brown to the meeting.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Murdo Fraser
Good morning, and welcome to the 28th meeting in 2022 of the COVID-19 Recovery Committee. We have received apologies from Brian Whittle MSP, and from our convener, Siobhan Brown, who has been unexpectedly detained but might be able to join us in the course of the meeting.
The first agenda item is to decide whether to take in private item 4, which is consideration of our approach to our inquiry into long Covid. Do members agree to take item 4 in private?
Members indicated agreement.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Murdo Fraser
Would the number be in the hundreds or fewer than that?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Murdo Fraser
Thank you—that is really interesting.
I move on to you, Rachel Helliwell. As I did with the others, I ask you to reflect on your experience of the process.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Murdo Fraser
We move on to item 2. The committee will hear from two panels of witnesses on Covid-19 surveillance.
The first panel will give evidence on waste water surveillance. I welcome to the meeting: Dr Rachel Helliwell, the director of the Centre of Expertise for Waters—CREW—and the Hydro Nation International Centre; George Ponton, head of research and innovation at Scottish Water; and Peter Singleton, research, innovation and evidence manager at the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. They all join us remotely.
I thank the witnesses for giving us their time and for their written submissions. We will allow an hour or so for the evidence session. I will start with some questions, then ask my colleagues to come in. If any of the witnesses would like to respond to a question that is not directed specifically to them, they should put an R in the chat box, then we will be able to bring them in. I am keen that everybody gets as much of an opportunity to speak as possible.
I ask each of the witnesses in turn, starting with Mr Ponton from Scottish Water, to tell us a little bit about their experience with waste water testing, how it worked in practice, what the challenges were and what they have learned from it for the future.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Murdo Fraser
Thank you for that. Do you have any reflections on the value that your work has had in driving Government policy?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Murdo Fraser
Okay. Thank you very much.
I will ask Peter Singleton a similar question to the original question that I put to Mr Ponton. What was your experience of the programme? What lessons have been learned from it for the future?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Murdo Fraser
Thank you. Before I bring in the others, I have a couple of follow-up questions based on what you said.
How many test points were there across the country? What were the resourcing implications for Scottish Water in undertaking that work?