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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SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Richard Leonard
My final question relates to the performance issue. How does the Standards Commission measure and demonstrate its outcomes? Do you have any kind of evaluation process that leads you to identify any improvements that can be made?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland 2024: Finance and performance”
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Richard Leonard
In the speech that the First Minister made on Monday, he said:
“we”
need to
“put in place clear milestones and targets”,
which is music to the ears of the Public Audit Committee and, I am sure, the Auditor General.
The problem is, however, that we have heard that so many times before. Let us look at the areas where the Auditor General identifies that there has been no progress. The annual recovery plan update, and the whole recovery plan, was first instituted in August 2021, and there is a real lack of transparency around that. The Auditor General also notes that the annual updates that we expect on service reform are not there either.
Why, only now—that is, two days ago—is it once again necessary to say that we need a new clear direction and we are going to set out milestones, when the evidence before us appears to show that, even when ambitions are set, progress reports are not made, milestones are not clear and there is no real sense that progress is being made? Why is it going to be any different this time?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland 2024: Finance and performance”
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Richard Leonard
Thank you very much indeed. I begin by asking you that perennial question: do you accept the findings and recommendations of the Auditor General’s report?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland 2024: Finance and performance”
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Richard Leonard
You mentioned regional variations. Appendix 3 of the Audit Scotland report shows quite marked variations in some of those measures. For example, on referrals for suspected cancer within the 62-day treatment guarantee, the figures for the two health boards in the area that I represent are 83 per cent for NHS Forth Valley and 89 per cent for NHS Lanarkshire against a target of 95 per cent. For NHS Shetland, the figure is 50 per cent against that target, and both NHS Tayside and NHS Grampian are at just 60 per cent. What analysis have you done to understand why there is such a variance between different health boards and health board areas?
09:45Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland 2024: Finance and performance”
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Richard Leonard
To give a fuller picture, if I look at the A and E stats, NHS Forth Valley and NHS Lanarkshire perform very poorly, do they not? The statutory target is for 95 per cent of people to receive treatment within four hours, but Lanarkshire’s performance is 55 per cent and Forth Valley’s is 54 per cent.
I will ask you a question that was posed to the Auditor General when he was here. Is there any correlation between poor performance in A and E and better performance in some of those other indicators?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland 2024: Finance and performance”
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Richard Leonard
We are going to touch on some of those performance measures as the morning progresses. Before I take us to another area, I place on record my membership of two trade unions that organise in the national health service.
I turn to staff sickness absence rates, which is recorded in this annual performance report on the NHS in Scotland as being at a 10-year high. What is your assessment of that issue, what are you doing to address it, and how are you going to turn it around?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland 2024: Finance and performance”
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Richard Leonard
Yes—the Public Audit Committee is indeed very interested in tackling digital exclusion.
I am conscious of the time, so I will bring in Stuart McMillan.
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland 2024: Finance and performance”
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Richard Leonard
We have covered an awful lot of ground this morning. If the budget is passed in a few weeks, the NHS budget will rise to £21 billion, for which you, Caroline Lamb, will be the accountable officer. Because it constitutes 40 per cent of the entire Scottish budget, it is important that we, as the Public Audit Committee, scrutinise what you are doing and examine areas where things are not going quite as well as we would like.
There is also a great deal of public interest in health and social care, and I think the national health service remains probably the best-loved public institution that we have.
I thank Caroline Lamb, Alan Gray and John Burns very much for their time and co-operation this morning, in answering our questions.
11:43 Meeting continued in private until 12:15.Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland 2024: Finance and performance”
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Richard Leonard
Our main item is consideration of the Auditor General for Scotland’s section 23 report, “NHS in Scotland 2024: Finance and performance”, which covers the national health service’s financial position and performance measures.
I welcome our witnesses to the committee. We are joined by Caroline Lamb, who is the chief executive of NHS Scotland and director general of health and social care in the Scottish Government. Alongside her is Alan Gray, who is the director of health and social care finance in the Scottish Government. We are also joined by John Burns, who is the chief operating officer of NHS Scotland.
We have questions to put to the witnesses over the next hour and a bit, but before we get to those, I ask Caroline Lamb to provide us with a short opening statement.
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland 2024: Finance and performance”
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Richard Leonard
Let us have a look at a couple of those points. In his speech on Monday, the First Minister reminded us that, last year, he referred to delayed discharge as
“the canary in the coal mine of our National Health Service.”
Paragraph 80 of Audit Scotland’s report says that delayed discharge rates are at the highest levels on record, so what is the state of the canary at the moment?
