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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.

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.

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Displaying 1132 contributions

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Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)

National Health Service Recovery Plan

Meeting date: 1 June 2021

Carol Mochan

Before I begin my first speech, might I say what a privilege it is to be here, speaking on behalf of my home region of South Scotland? I fully intend to use my time in Parliament to stand up for the ordinary people of this country and the communities that are often ignored by a political class who are distant from the lives of their constituents.

I came here to get things done—that is what the people of South Scotland elected me to do—and it is important that we understand why so little has been done over the past decade before we move on to the next round of promises. There is no doubt that the campaign that we have all just fought did not pay as much attention to the desperate state of care, the NHS and mental health services as I would have liked, so I welcome the fact that a plan will eventually be brought to the chamber to deal with those matters.

I will focus particularly on the national care service and on the concerning way in which carers are treated in this country. In care, the root of the problem is pay. There is no doubt that the Government is very accomplished at media management, presenting a progressive face to the public and promoting its own narrative, but if that story is not reflected in the pockets of care workers—some of the most overworked people in the country—then it is meaningless.

We must also consider that the injustice disproportionately affects women—more often than not, women who have never been blessed with the advantages of family wealth or an additional income. Taking those factors into account, I have to ask why it has taken so long for the issue to become a priority for the Government. The pandemic may have highlighted the issue, but it should not have required such a life-defining event to turn our attention to these people, who have been undervalued for so long.

The recent Feeley report sets out some important steps forward in tackling the issue, yet it has failed to adequately address the chronic levels of low pay and the poor terms and conditions experienced by most people who work in care. I regularly speak to people of all ages and backgrounds—paid and unpaid, working every hour that they can to care for others—and the message is the same: we are struggling to keep our heads above water.

It is time that we started taking carers and a national care service seriously, but a national care service has to be worthy of the name and involve patients, carers, trade unions and local government from the outset. We cannot keep building institutions from the top down and expecting them to meet the needs of the people at the bottom. Rather than talking about the “esteem” in which a national care service will be held, let us be clear about the financial commitment to it, because if we want world class public services, we will have to pay for them.

When Labour created the NHS, Britain led the world in socialised health. It was a complete shift in the lives of the whole country, and I see no reason why we cannot aim for that sort of momentous change again. I hope that today is used by the Government as an opportunity to listen and to take on board the fact that there is genuine scepticism about any plans that it has put forward for the reform of health. Why? Because the Government has been in power for 14 years and, during that time, we have seen the NHS become worryingly underfunded and understaffed. Also, as colleagues have remarked, waiting times are now at concerningly high levels. This morning, I spoke to the Scottish Association for Mental Health about the concerning waits for children and young people to access CAMHS services—an on-going issue that must receive urgent attention.

In my final few seconds, I return to the issue of carers and ask the Government to be honest with them. The latest Barnett consequentials provide Scotland with around £700 million for the health and social care budget. It seems sensible that the lion’s share of that money should be spent on giving care staff a serious pay rise. I urge the Government to support the call from Scottish Labour and the trade union movement for carers to receive £15 an hour. In my own region, that would make a vast difference to the lives of many people. Let us achieve something meaningful straight out of the gate—right away—and let us send a message from this new Parliament. Let us pay back those people to whom we owe so much.

15:58