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 2601 contributions
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COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Road to Recovery Inquiry
Meeting date: 17 November 2022
John Mason
That is helpful. I will move on to pensions with Mr Fairs. You seem positive that even somebody with a small pension pot could take some money out of it, which would give them a bit of flexibility in their later working life. The Trades Union Congress has said, to counter that, that it would lead to people being in poverty once they retire. Are people who are in their 50s and 60s getting the advice that they need, and how does that compare with other countries? Do we have more flexibility in those areas than other countries have?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Road to Recovery Inquiry
Meeting date: 10 November 2022
John Mason
Do you think that that will become clear over time, or will it be like the situation with ME, which, as some ME people would claim, has still not really been pinned down after 30 or 40 years?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Road to Recovery Inquiry
Meeting date: 10 November 2022
John Mason
Can I just press you on an issue, Professor McCartney? You have said a few times now that a number of health issues are linked to austerity and economic factors, but is it not the case that certain issues—obesity, say, and perhaps mental health—are also very much seen in better-off parts of the population and, despite that, we have not been able to pin them down and sort them out?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Road to Recovery Inquiry
Meeting date: 10 November 2022
John Mason
That is interesting. That recognition that, for some people it is better to be out of work while for some it is better to be in work, is a more nuanced approach than we sometimes get. We were talking about mental health in the previous session. Presumably, for some people, their mental health problem is that they are working too many hours and have a bad work/life balance, and that could improve by them either reducing their hours or leaving the workforce.
On your point about workers coming through, given that our population is forecast to fall, does that have to mean bringing people in from other countries to bolster our workforce or are there other answers to that question?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Road to Recovery Inquiry
Meeting date: 10 November 2022
John Mason
People deliberately went into city centres to shop and to go to cinemas and restaurants.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Road to Recovery Inquiry
Meeting date: 10 November 2022
John Mason
Building on some of the things that have already been discussed, I believe, Professor Sheikh, that you said that we can compare mental health in Scotland and Singapore. Can we also compare, say, long Covid numbers in Scotland and France, economic inactivity and so on? Are the definitions for all those things the same in different countries?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Road to Recovery Inquiry
Meeting date: 10 November 2022
John Mason
A lot of comparisons and similarities have been drawn between ME and long Covid. To be fair, I think that we have struggled over the years to get a definition of ME, and GPs seem to vary quite a lot in that respect. Is it fair to compare the two?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Road to Recovery Inquiry
Meeting date: 10 November 2022
John Mason
Professor McCartney, did you want to come in on this question?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Road to Recovery Inquiry
Meeting date: 10 November 2022
John Mason
I think that highlighting that irony is good evidence, but can I press you on that? Is there any sign of employers now thinking differently? We hear that a lot of employers are struggling to get staff, which suggests that they might be more adaptable to taking on people with long-term conditions and disabilities. Do you think that that is happening?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Road to Recovery Inquiry
Meeting date: 10 November 2022
John Mason
I want to follow up on some of those points. Tom Waters, you said that the definition of economic activity is well defined and very much agreed on between countries. My understanding is that, to be economically active, you only have to work one hour a week, which surprised me somewhat because I would have thought that one hour a week and zero hours a week were much the same, whereas 35 hours is quite different. Is that correct?
