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 1184 contributions
Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Carol Mochan
I thank Christine Grahame for her intervention, and I know that my colleague Katy Clark and other members who support the WASPI women in this injustice will welcome it, too. It is really important to have such a good debate and to hear good points from across the chamber.
More needs to be done, compensation needs to be provided and we all need to stand with the WASPI women until it is secured.
18:46Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Carol Mochan
This is an important debate, which brings an essential issue to the chamber. It recognises that, clearly and simply, the WASPI women deserve compensation.
I welcome the WASPI women who are in the public gallery. When meeting WASPI women directly, I have heard their stories and their fears about the serious impact that their disadvantage will have on their lives. Their stories have moved us all, and it would not be right for me to hide from the commitments that I have made in the past. It is impossible to argue that women who were born between 1950 and 1960 have not had to fight for equality their whole lives. Many of those women started their working lives at a time when workplaces were not structured to support or welcome them. As they started their careers, it is likely that they were employed prior to the Equal Pay Act 1970, at a time when many would have been expected to leave work when they got married or had children.
Those women have now been disadvantaged further through serious mismanagement in communications about how they would receive their state pension. That is clear. As we have heard, more than 300,000 women in Scotland have been impacted by the scandal. The decision to increase the age in the Pensions Act 2011 affected 2.6 million women across the UK, and it led to financial and emotional distress for women throughout Scotland. Those affected have had to adapt rapidly and, in many cases, to completely change their plans for their future retirement and make up for any financial losses, if they could anticipate what that would mean.
In March 2024, as we have heard, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman revealed the Government’s failing and said that the women “deserve compensation”. Therefore, I think that we all agree that the refusal by Governments to provide any compensation thus far is absolutely unacceptable. Without the ability to plan for the future properly, the emotional impact on those women has taken a concerning toll that, for some, can become insurmountable. That has serious mental health impacts, which WASPI campaigners have fought repeatedly to expose. There are numerous knock-on effects on the quality of life that the women are able to lead now, including serious struggles to afford the necessities of life while experiencing anger and disappointment at a system that does not seem to value their contribution at all—a system that does not work for people.
Although they are appropriate, the acknowledgement and the apology from the UK Government do nothing for the women who have been left short and turned away throughout their lives. We all recognise the economic disaster that the Government must deal with, but, given the decades-long fight that those women have had to put up in order to expose Government failings, an apology is not acceptable—it does not rectify such an injustice. In a country in which the pension age gap sits at 39 per cent, the Government’s response is simply not acceptable to WASPI women, who have provided so much to our communities and economy.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Carol Mochan
The first theme is the definition of terminal illness. A range of views have been expressed about the eligibility criteria used in the bill around the definition. Will you give us your views on that? In particular, do you think that conditions such as motor neurone disease, Alzheimer’s and cerebral palsy should or would be covered by that definition?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Carol Mochan
Marianne, do you have a view?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Carol Mochan
Given what you have said throughout today’s evidence session, I absolutely understand.
If the bill became law, would your organisation find it helpful if assisted dying was not discussed at all, or should people have the right to have that option placed in front of them when they discussed their options?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Carol Mochan
Okay, that is helpful.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Carol Mochan
In theory, though, people should be aware of the option.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Carol Mochan
My question relates to the situation if the bill became law, so I will try to make it brief. Lyn Pornaro talked about assisted dying as a treatment option. I suppose that my question can be quite straightforward.
Under the Montgomery ruling, people should, rightly, have all the options put to them. In this case, as disabled people’s organisations, would it help with the issue of pressure, in the way that you have described it, if that was not the case—that is, if assisted dying was not seen as a reasonable treatment option, and so was not discussed at that stage? Alternatively, do you feel, as you expressed before, that that might mean that people did not have all the options placed in front of them? If the bill was enacted and became law, how would you feel about that?
11:45Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Carol Mochan
Do you think that it would be helpful to have an expected timeframe for people in relation to their terminal illness diagnosis?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Carol Mochan
Yes, of course.