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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Displaying 1656 contributions
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Meeting of the Commission
“Quality of public audit in Scotland: Annual report 2023/24”
Meeting date: 24 June 2024
Jamie Greene
I want to pick up on a few issues that have come up, particularly the variation between in-house auditing and that done by external auditors. Do you have any statistical information that could allow us to compare performance or completion against targets, for example? That would give us a feel for whether external auditors are more on target than your internal teams, or not, as the case may be.
Meeting of the Commission
“Quality of public audit in Scotland: Annual report 2023/24”
Meeting date: 24 June 2024
Jamie Greene
I ask you to stick to the timeliness of completion, as I have some other questions about that.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “NHS in Scotland 2023”
Meeting date: 20 June 2024
Jamie Greene
A very good morning to you. I will see if my voice lasts; I will try my best. As you can probably hear, I am recovering from illness, including Covid.
I thought that I would share a little story with you, because it is probably indicative of a situation that many people in Scotland have found themselves in. When I was unwell, I made the decision to call 111 for assistance, in line with the advice. I picked up the phone at 8 pm, and—I know this because I have just checked the data on my mobile phone—I spent two hours and 24 minutes trying to speak to somebody. The call was not answered for an hour and 12 minutes and I was in a waiting queue along, I presume, with many other people. I expect that many of those people simply hung up, but I hung in there as best I could.
When the call was answered, it was dealt with by a operator who was not medically trained, but who did their best to assist. The outcome of that two-and-a-half-hour phone call was simply this: “If you feel really bad, go to the hospital, or we’ll get an out-of-hours GP to call you back.” I said, “Yes, please.” The out-of-hours general practitioner eventually called me back at 2 o’clock in the morning—some six and a half hours after I first called. The outcome of that conversation was to be told, “If you feel really bad, phone an ambulance or get yourself to hospital; otherwise, call your GP in the morning.” I duly did that.
The third and final part of my story is that I called the GP at 3 minutes past 8 that same morning and was told that there were no appointments left, because it was 3 minutes past 8. I was told—guess where this is going—to call 111 or, if I felt really unwell, to get myself to hospital.
I suspect that that is an experience that is shared by many people. Does that really sound like an NHS that is working for people?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “NHS in Scotland 2023”
Meeting date: 20 June 2024
Jamie Greene
I ask because the data that I have is from the Audit Scotland report, which is from September 2023, so you may have something more up to date.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “NHS in Scotland 2023”
Meeting date: 20 June 2024
Jamie Greene
Yes, please.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “NHS in Scotland 2023”
Meeting date: 20 June 2024
Jamie Greene
It is 6.2 per cent.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “NHS in Scotland 2023”
Meeting date: 20 June 2024
Jamie Greene
On sickness, anyone who speaks to people who work in the NHS will tell you that they are super stressed. In the past couple of weeks, campaigning members of the Parliament have had the luxury of chapping on people’s doors, probably much to their annoyance. Frequently, we have heard that many NHS staff are considering leaving the profession altogether. Absence due to stress and long-term health issues seems to be a problem. I appreciate that people get acutely sick—we all get sick, including NHS staff—and some people get Covid. However, I want to understand the underlying absence levels due to long-term illness. What is the trajectory on those? What are you doing to support people who work in our NHS?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “NHS in Scotland 2023”
Meeting date: 20 June 2024
Jamie Greene
Here is the problem: the situation that I found myself in was not an accident or, indeed, an emergency. Many people will present at hospital simply because there is no other option available to them, and that is adding a huge amount of pressure to our accident and emergency departments.
There is a situation, when someone has taken unwell, that falls outside a regular GP visit or appointment but in relation to which, between 3 minutes past 8 in the morning and 8 o’clock the following morning, there is simply no option other than to spend three hours on the phone to 111 and not achieve anything, or to turn up at hospital. That is my point. The system feels broken, and there are thousands of people out there who feel the same way.
Are we looking at this in the right way? Is there any fresh or blue-sky thinking about how we deal with people who want to speak to a clinician as quickly as possible but do not want to burden the hospital system and absolutely cannot get an appointment with their GP, sometimes for weeks on end? There has to be a middle ground somewhere, and it does not sound as though there is one.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “NHS in Scotland 2023”
Meeting date: 20 June 2024
Jamie Greene
Where are we at with A and E at the moment? There has been a lot of discussion recently about how long people have to wait once they get to A and E. There is a four-hour waiting time target, which I believe means that 95 per cent of people should be admitted, discharged or transferred for treatment within four hours of presenting. What is the current statistic?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “NHS in Scotland 2023”
Meeting date: 20 June 2024
Jamie Greene
That is so way off target. You are 30 percentage points off the target. What is going wrong?
