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 774 contributions
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Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Brian Whittle
One of the lessons that I learned from last week was to never pre-empt or pre-judge what you are about to hear. I do not know what the expectations were for the meeting, but it far exceeded what I thought I would get from it. Those who attended were incredibly well prepared and well informed, and were not shy in coming forward. What they said was not what I expected. I put on record my thanks to them.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Brian Whittle
To take that slightly further, what I am getting at is that a regular healthcare professional who knows the person will notice subtle changes. That is the other way to define capacity—
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Brian Whittle
Concerns about palliative care have been raised several times. Should we explore the level of palliative care that is available and whether inability to access palliative care might influence a decision on whether to seek assisted dying as a remedy? Do you have a view on that, Susan?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Brian Whittle
If I may, I will bring you in in a little bit. First, I want to add another layer to my line of questioning—just to see whether I can make it more complicated.
If the consensus is that access to palliative care is, at best, patchy across various medical conditions and geographical areas, where is the line on saying that we have reached a level of such care that satisfies our concerns about it influencing a decision to access assisted dying? I suppose that that is an impossible question, but I want to put it out there.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Brian Whittle
Does anyone have anything to add?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Brian Whittle
We have looked at the issue for a number of years. Generally speaking, the standards to which the UK holds itself are probably not as high as I would like them to be, but they tend to be higher than is the case in much of the European Union. However, it would be appropriate to double-check that that is still the case. As colleagues have said, it would be appropriate to defer the decision on the instrument.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Brian Whittle
Good morning. My question is supplementary to David Torrance’s questions. I listened to what was said, and I want to clarify something. On testing for capacity, is there the potential for medical staff whose job it is to determine capacity, no matter how well trained they are, to come to a conclusion that is different from that of the person’s GP, who has seen them consistently over a period of time and who understands the individual’s specific condition? Is there a concern that there could be two different conclusions on capacity?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Brian Whittle
The witnesses have spoken passionately and eloquently about the lack of rights for the disability community, and about concerns around the impact that the bill would have on that community. They have highlighted strongly how society is currently not necessarily giving the disability community the services that they deserve and to which they have the right.
There is a flipside to that—I will offer the devil’s advocate’s view, if you like. You may have an objection to the bill because of the way in which society treats the disabled community, and because you feel that disability rights would be eroded. What about the rights of those people who—as my colleague Sandesh Gulhane highlighted—are suffering long term, in the way that the bill is intended to address, and who are currently looking to go to Switzerland or whatever to access that end-of-life option? Is there not a case that, in protecting disabled rights, we are eroding the rights of others?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Budget 2025-26
Meeting date: 17 December 2024
Brian Whittle
The information that we have is that sportscotland’s funding is down by 2.3 per cent in real terms, and active healthy lives funding is down by 2.3 per cent. I recognise that you share an interest in getting our population active, cabinet secretary, but the reality is that, as the health budget has increased in proportional terms, at the same time, the proportion of investment in local councils has decreased and the health of the nation has decreased. The cabinet secretary recognises that many of the solutions to our poor health record in Scotland lie outside the health budget, because a lot of them are delivered by councils.
Do you recognise that there is a huge reduction in the opportunity that is available to our population because of the closure of many facilities and the decrease in physical activity opportunities in our education system?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Tobacco and Vapes Bill
Meeting date: 17 December 2024
Brian Whittle
Just as a follow-up, what we are discussing and describing are penalties for breaking the law, but the flipside to that is this: how do we educate our kids in such a way that they decide not to go down that route in the first place? Is there any complementary way in which this legislation will be backed up?
