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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Criminal Justice Committee, Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, and Social Justice and Social Security Committee (Joint Meeting)
Reducing Drug Deaths in Scotland and Tackling Problem Drug Use
Meeting date: 2 February 2022
Gillian Mackay
Good morning—[Inaudible.]—UK Government—[Inaudible.]—Is the minister confident that there is still a way forward for Scotland to launch a pilot?
Criminal Justice Committee, Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, and Social Justice and Social Security Committee (Joint Meeting)
Reducing Drug Deaths in Scotland and Tackling Problem Drug Use
Meeting date: 2 February 2022
Gillian Mackay
Thank you.
Criminal Justice Committee, Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, and Social Justice and Social Security Committee (Joint Meeting)
Reducing Drug Deaths in Scotland and Tackling Problem Drug Use
Meeting date: 2 February 2022
Gillian Mackay
Just briefly, convener.
In his evidence at yesterday’s joint committee meeting, Kit Malthouse said that he did not recognise poverty as a driver of drug use and argued that drugs and violence drive poverty. I am deeply concerned about the apparent equating of drug use with violence and the UK Government’s belief that poverty does not drive it. What impact will that clear conflict between the Scottish and UK Governments’ understanding of the causes of drug use have on your ability to work together on the issue and on efforts to tackle the stigma surrounding drug use?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Common Frameworks
Meeting date: 1 February 2022
Gillian Mackay
Did stakeholders raise any concerns about the frameworks? The committee did not receive any responses to its calls for views, but it would be good to understand whether any concerns were raised with the Government.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Health and Wellbeing of Children and Young People
Meeting date: 1 February 2022
Gillian Mackay
Good morning. It was recently reported that,
“Since 2014, Scots have been abused due to their sexual orientation more than 7500 times, while the number of hate crimes relating to transgender identity doubled between 2014 and 2020.”
We know that 40 per cent of LGBT young people consider themselves to have a mental health problem, compared with 25 per cent of all young people in Scotland. Are mental health and other support services equipped to deal with the particular issues and trauma that are faced by LGBT young people?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Health and Wellbeing of Children and Young People
Meeting date: 1 February 2022
Gillian Mackay
School counsellors are a phenomenal thing to have, but I have spoken to several stakeholders who believe that we need training places for mental health clinicians to be more accessible to people from a diversity of backgrounds. For example, as you will know, training to be a mental health counsellor takes a significant financial investment in terms of supervision and often requires a large amount of voluntary work to make up accreditation hours. Those barriers can often exclude many of the people we would perhaps like to see in a counselling position—people who experienced care as children and young people or people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds—from entering this type of profession. What can the Government do to ensure that we can have more of those people in place because, in order for children and young people who have these experiences to build trust, it is imperative that they have a counsellor who understands the lifestyle and background that they are coming from.
Criminal Justice Committee, Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, and Social Justice and Social Security Committee (Joint Meeting)
Reducing Drug Deaths in Scotland and Tackling Problem Drug Use
Meeting date: 1 February 2022
Gillian Mackay
Good afternoon, minister. Do you think that the war on drugs has been a success?
Criminal Justice Committee, Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, and Social Justice and Social Security Committee (Joint Meeting)
Reducing Drug Deaths in Scotland and Tackling Problem Drug Use
Meeting date: 1 February 2022
Gillian Mackay
Thank you, convener—we could discuss this subject all afternoon.
Minister, drugs are often cut with everything from baby powder to rat poison, and even cement dust. Testing drugs would prevent poisoning and thereby prevent further pressure on health services, which are devolved. In order to ensure that we can save lives, would you devolve powers to allow the Scottish Government to set up drug testing?
Criminal Justice Committee, Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, and Social Justice and Social Security Committee (Joint Meeting)
Reducing Drug Deaths in Scotland and Tackling Problem Drug Use
Meeting date: 1 February 2022
Gillian Mackay
You said that you need more evidence on safe consumption rooms. There are at least 39 sites in Canada, there are peer-reviewed articles from Portugal and there is an evidence base in San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Vermont, Delaware and Portland, Oregon—I have used the example of just three countries, from a cursory glance at the use of safe consumption rooms around the world.
The evidence is well established that safe consumption rooms save lives, and the Scottish Parliament has backed the approach. Given the evidence, and the democratic mandate for safe consumption rooms, what do you say to the families of people who could be helped by such facilities but currently cannot be, because of your Government’s decisions?
Criminal Justice Committee, Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, and Social Justice and Social Security Committee (Joint Meeting)
Reducing Drug Deaths in Scotland and Tackling Problem Drug Use
Meeting date: 1 February 2022
Gillian Mackay
Am I out of time, convener?
