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 1153 contributions
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 26 September 2023
Emma Harper
I draw members’ attention to the fact that, while I was an NHS Scotland employee, I paid into an NHS Scotland pension.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Emma Harper
Thank you.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Emma Harper
I want to come in on the back of other questions that have been asked. In chapter 2 of its “Tipping the Scales” report, IPPR Scotland says:
“Important action has been taken within devolved powers ... demonstrating what can be achieved with political will and investment.”
The report talks about the devolution of new welfare powers and the establishment of Social Security Scotland. More than £1 billion has been spent on 12 new benefits, which include council tax reduction, the Scottish child payment and the best start grant.
A lot of those benefits are outside the health portfolio. Ministers in the Scottish Government such as the Minister for Housing and the Minister for Social Care, Mental Wellbeing and Sport have their own portfolios, but everything crosses over in relation to health improvement, so I am interested in how we consider the budget.
We should value what has been set up by Social Security Scotland—it focuses on fairness, dignity and respect rather than taking the punitive approach that the Department for Work and Pensions takes. Should anything else be picked up in relation to which form of welfare support would help to improve Scotland’s safety net?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Emma Harper
Okay, thank you.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Emma Harper
I suppose that it is an NHS board’s responsibility to deliver. The Government has a plan but the NHS board would be the one to deliver the women’s health plan in NHS Lothian, for instance. NHS Lothian would propose how it would monitor the delivery of its plans and the outcomes that it has achieved.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Emma Harper
I am asking because I am the co-convener of the wellbeing economy cross-party group and we have had lots of interesting discussion about how it is good to support wellbeing as a nation and not just to measure productivity on GDP.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Emma Harper
We will probably come back to tackling poverty, but I have a question on that issue. Certain things are reserved to the UK Government and some items, such as health, are devolved, but the money is not. What role do food producers and retailers have in engaging with Government to look at how we support diets that are healthier and ensure that people can afford healthier food? Some of the food that is marketed right now, such as processed food, is jam-packed full of calories and does not tell your brain that you are satiated, so you keep eating. There is emerging research on that, which I find pretty fascinating. Is there a role for supermarkets, restaurants and cafes to work with Government to help to deliver a less obesogenic environment?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Emma Harper
I recently read that the Scottish Government is providing £700 million of support to mitigate things such as the bedroom tax. I know that this is straying into politics. The Barnett formula makes adjustments for Scotland, but we are constrained by the way that the budget is delivered in Scotland by another Government. Do we need to be looking at alternatives to how the Scottish Government’s block grant is delivered?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Emma Harper
I am thinking about community pharmacy as another way to direct people—pharmacy first, for instance—and our national treatment centres, which have been established so that elective surgery can be done and emergency beds are not taking up the space for elective patients. That work has been done, but I feel like we are spinning plates sometimes because none of it is an overnight fix. I used the example of Professor Pekka Puska in Finland: it took three decades but, with that approach, he reduced the mortality of men from cardiovascular disease by 80 per cent.
Is the Scottish Government going in the right direction when it comes to budget choices around health and—on the back of Evelyn’s question—when it comes to helping people manage expectations as well?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 19 September 2023
Emma Harper
Yes, and I need to remind everybody that I am a currently registered nurse. I forgot to say that at the beginning.
I have a quick question about the economy. Normally, we take gross domestic product as a measure of how successful a country is. However, we now have a Cabinet Secretary for Wellbeing Economy, Fair Work and Energy, so we are looking at wellbeing and we know that, if we help to get people out of poverty, that can support them into being more productive. Do you agree that supporting a wellbeing economy is an approach that we can take to how we budget for health? It will be relevant across portfolios when we are talking about things such as housing and poverty and addressing the issues that we face in Scotland.