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 2241 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Adult mental health”
Meeting date: 14 December 2023
Graham Simpson
It would be nice if we could have a Scottish version. It may not be exactly the same, because everywhere is different. Maybe you could be that visionary clinical leader that you described, Dr Cook.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Adult mental health”
Meeting date: 14 December 2023
Graham Simpson
That is a national thing.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Adult mental health”
Meeting date: 14 December 2023
Graham Simpson
It is not the direction of travel. There is a national target for spending 10 per cent of the budget on mental health services. Much of the delivery of that will come through health boards and IJBs—
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Adult mental health”
Meeting date: 14 December 2023
Graham Simpson
So, if they are, they will surely report back to you, and then you can monitor whether they are on track.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Adult mental health”
Meeting date: 14 December 2023
Graham Simpson
I will follow up on what Sharon Dowey asked about. She covered the NHS England mental health dashboard, which I have had a look at. I am sorry if you feel that it is too bureaucratic, Dr Cook. You can come back in on that, but to me, it provides very useful information. It follows progress, which is what this is all about. That links into what Mr Coffey asked about. It is about following the money and seeing what progress has been made. That is what the dashboard is all about. It used to be called the mental health five-year forward view dashboard, which is a bit of a mouthful. The website, which anyone can look at, says that it
“brings together key data from across mental health services to measure the performance of the NHS”.
Should we not be doing that here?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Adult mental health”
Meeting date: 14 December 2023
Graham Simpson
I am all in favour of doing things simply, rather than introducing bureaucracy. Are you basically saying that you would like to have a Scottish mental health dashboard? I put that question to Dr Cook and Caroline Lamb.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Adult mental health”
Meeting date: 14 December 2023
Graham Simpson
From what you have said, that will be possible, but not until after next summer.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Adult mental health”
Meeting date: 14 December 2023
Graham Simpson
When will it be possible?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Adult mental health”
Meeting date: 14 December 2023
Graham Simpson
Initially, it will just be for you. You and your colleagues will be able to look at it, but the public will not.
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “Adult mental health”
Meeting date: 14 December 2023
Graham Simpson
That is correct. Not everybody could use such a system.
I asked about the Trieste model partly because it sounds like a good one. However, my reasons also go back to the convener’s question about the system being fragmented. I am not sure whether you agreed that the system is fragmented, Caroline, because you said two different things. However, if we accept that we have a fragmented system and that people fall through the cracks, we can see that that leads to the amount of mental health work that the police have to pick up. That is another matter that the committee has been exploring.
You will know, because you have heard it from the police, that the vast majority of their time is taken up dealing with people who have mental health issues. A lot of that time is taken up sitting in hospitals when they could be out on the beat dealing with crime. That is not a good situation. We heard from NHS Lothian that things are a little bit better in its area. That health board has a system in place that helps to prevent police from sitting in hospitals, but that is just NHS Lothian. In other parts of the country, including my area—I represent Central Scotland, which includes Lanarkshire—that system is not in place. In Lanarkshire, we have had situations in which entire shifts of police were sat in accident and emergency. That is ludicrous, is it not? If we had somewhere that police could take some people with mental health issues—not everybody—that would free them up. That has to be better, has it not?
