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: 8 September 2022
Murdo Fraser
I put the same point to either of your public health colleagues, to see whether they have any comments on the impact on public health in the NHS, should the same thing occur.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 8 September 2022
Murdo Fraser
That is helpful, and leads me on neatly to the question that I was going to ask about public sector reform. The convener quoted from “Investing in Scotland’s Future: Resource Spending Review”, which is the background to all this. I will direct this question first to Richard Robinson from Audit Scotland—just so that you are aware, Richard; it is coming to you.
A couple of quotations from the RSR identify that there has been substantial growth in employment in the devolved public sector. The review states that
“continued growth of the public sector away from frontline services is not sustainable”.
It goes on to state that the Scottish Government recognises
“the need to reset the public sector following the COVID-19 pandemic, including by returning to a pre-pandemic size”.
From Audit Scotland’s perspective, how realistic is it to return the public sector to its pre-pandemic size? From a practical point of view, how quickly could that be done and what are the implications of that?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 8 September 2022
Murdo Fraser
Would any of our NHS colleagues like to come in?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 8 September 2022
Murdo Fraser
Thank you. That is very interesting.
10:00COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 30 June 2022
Murdo Fraser
Right. What is it, then?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 30 June 2022
Murdo Fraser
Very good. I am very impressed. [Laughter.]
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 30 June 2022
Murdo Fraser
Good morning, minister and colleagues. There are a couple of issues that I would like to pursue.
Minister, at the start you talked about information here being easy to understand; I think that that was true of parts, but there were other parts with which we struggled. The Scottish Government early in the pandemic produced the FACTS acronym. I know that Jason Leitch will know what FACTS stands for, but I do not know many other people who do. Minister, do you know what FACTS stands for?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 30 June 2022
Murdo Fraser
I was going to ask you about what follow-up you have done, but you have already answered that question for me.
One of the other issues that we have looked at is trying to counter disinformation, which we were talking about earlier. To put that in context, we have all seen that the vaccination programme has been a great success—there is no doubt about it—but a segment of the population is still resistant to vaccination. When we see the segmentation, quite a lot of that is among particular ethnic minority groups. The Polish community is one example of a group that, for whatever reason, whether that be cultural reasons or something else, is resistant to taking up vaccination. Do you think that enough was done in terms of public health messaging to try to counter disinformation about the effect of vaccination?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 30 June 2022
Murdo Fraser
“Hands, face, space”.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 23 June 2022
Murdo Fraser
Thanks for that answer. I am sure that all the MSPs here are very familiar with the situation of being bombarded with queries from constituents asking, “In these circumstances, can I do X, Y and Z?” We were not equipped to answer those questions, and it was a difficult and time-consuming process for us to get answers.