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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Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 22 March 2022
Gillian Martin
The third item on our agenda is consideration of three related negative instruments. The instruments refer to annual rate changes for charges for residential accommodation.
The first instrument increases the value of the personal expenses allowance in line with average earnings, which is an increase of 5.8 per cent.
The second instrument increases the value of savings credit disregard in line with average earnings, which is forecast at 5.8 per cent. It also increases the lower capital limit from £18,000 to £18,500 and the upper capital limit from £28,750 to £29,750 in line with the consumer prices index, which is forecast at 3.1 per cent—I hope that everyone is following this.
The purpose of the third instrument is to disregard payments made to individuals living in residential care by the Scottish infected blood support scheme and equivalent schemes enacted in other parts of the UK.
The Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee considered the instruments and made no recommendations to us. No motions to annul have been received in relation to the instruments.
If members have no comments to make, I propose that the committee makes no recommendations in relation to these negative instruments.
As no member objects, we agree to that approach.
At our next meeting on 29 March, the committee will hear from the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care as part of our inquiry into alternative pathways to primary care.
12:09 Meeting continued in private until 12:27.Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 22 March 2022
Gillian Martin
That is helpful.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 22 March 2022
Gillian Martin
We will now go to Adam Stachura for the Age Scotland perspective.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 22 March 2022
Gillian Martin
We come to an issue that has come up an awful lot in our inquiry—the concept of a single electronic patient record. Sandesh Gulhane will lead the questioning.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 22 March 2022
Gillian Martin
Who would you like to answer first?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 22 March 2022
Gillian Martin
I will bring in Christiana Melam next, and then we will move on to questions from Evelyn Tweed.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 22 March 2022
Gillian Martin
We have extended our session by around 10 minutes, because we want to give a good airing to the inequalities theme, with questions led by Paul O’Kane.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 22 March 2022
Gillian Martin
I want to pick up on what Chris Mackie said about human rights. Last week, the committee heard from Jess Sussmann, who is policy lead for the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Scotland. She pointed to the fact that a lot of patients who her members see have acute mental ill-health conditions, and that, for a lot of them, doing things digitally effectively cancelled out their access to healthcare because most of them would not do that. Where do we stand on making sure that a spread of services that are right for the individual are made available?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 22 March 2022
Gillian Martin
Thank you so much—thanks to you all.
Clare Cook and Alison Leitch want to come back in, and I will bring them back in, but Sandesh Gulhane has a supplementary question.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 22 March 2022
Gillian Martin
Thank you, Christiana—I really like what you said about the whole-person approach. When I listen to you, it strikes me that, while we, as elected representatives, have people in crisis coming to us, I often worry about the people who do not come and see me. Everybody goes to their GP surgery instead. Would you agree that it is important to bring services to where people are? I am thinking about the hard-to reach people who need help.
