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 740 contributions
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 10 November 2022
Murdo Fraser
You say that people are taking retirement. To what extent do we understand the reasons for that? Did they take early retirement because they were working from home for two years and just decided that they did not want to go back into a workplace environment, or are there other factors behind it? Do we have enough data to explain it?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 10 November 2022
Murdo Fraser
Those who have retired.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 10 November 2022
Murdo Fraser
In the health service, that might well be the case.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 3 November 2022
Murdo Fraser
Thanks very much.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 3 November 2022
Murdo Fraser
Professor Fothergill opened his mouth; I thought that he was going to say something.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 3 November 2022
Murdo Fraser
Thank you. I have another question, but before I move on, do any other members of the panel want to contribute?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 3 November 2022
Murdo Fraser
Thank you. I am going to go to David Freeman again, because the paper from the ONS says:
“Data suggests that some of the increased inactivity could be due to long COVID.”
That suggests that you might take a slightly different view from Professor Fothergill.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 3 November 2022
Murdo Fraser
That is a very interesting reply, because it leads me neatly on to the second question that I was going to ask, which picks up what you say in your paper about the impact on the labour market of long-term sickness and, in particular, long Covid. You suggest in your paper that you are quite sceptical about the idea that long Covid is a major factor in an increase in economic inactivity.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 3 November 2022
Murdo Fraser
We can move on—I put the same question to David Freeman of the ONS.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 3 November 2022
Murdo Fraser
Good morning to the panel. I will pursue a couple of issues, if time will permit.
First, I am interested in understanding to what extent the issues that we are seeing in the labour market, in particular with economic activity, are specific to Scotland or are in line with what is happening elsewhere, whether in other parts of the UK or internationally. Are there Scotland-specific aspects that we should be interested in? I appreciate everything that you have said about the data, and that there might be gaps there, but I am interested in hearing some views on that issue. Perhaps Dr Hannah Randolph, of the Fraser of Allander Institute, can start with some thoughts.