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
Tobacco and Vapes Bill
Meeting date: 17 December 2024
Brian Whittle
Good morning, minister and guests. I want to go back to the question of how we enforce the legislation. When I pick my daughter up from school, I am always shocked by the number of kids who are openly vaping. If you talk to the on-site police officer, he will tell you about the amount of product that he takes off kids daily—bags full of the stuff. If it were down to me, I would take a much harsher approach and ensure that the products were used only for smoking cessation.
Given, in particular, the disparity between Scottish index of multiple deprivation 1 and SIMD 5 areas when it comes to smoking, how will we ensure that the legislation is enforced under the new LCM? After all, it is not being enforced just now.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Tobacco and Vapes Bill
Meeting date: 17 December 2024
Brian Whittle
Could you, through the LCM, create further restrictions on access to the likes of vapes and who can retail them?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Budget 2025-26
Meeting date: 17 December 2024
Brian Whittle
Good morning, cabinet secretary. In answer to my colleague Mr Sweeney’s question about the allocation of funding, you touched on the fact that, sometimes, the way that funding is allocated makes it hard to see where it goes. That is one of the main criticisms. In such a huge budget, it is very difficult to follow the money. Is it not about time that we got to a position where we understand where the money is spent? It cannot be right that £21 billion of public funding goes into the NHS, and we do not know where it has gone.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Budget 2025-26
Meeting date: 17 December 2024
Brian Whittle
I have a final question. We have moved away from a situation in which, roughly speaking, a third of the budget went to health and a third of it went to councils. Obviously, the health budget has increased dramatically, while the local government budget has decreased dramatically and health outcomes have become increasingly poor. I have talked about preventative health in the Parliament for the best part of a decade, and the situation has not improved.
The cabinet secretary says that he is keen to move towards a preventative health agenda, but one of the issues that we face is the lack of data to measure progress in that respect. How will the Scottish Government measure the impact of a preventative health agenda on the Scottish population?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Budget 2025-26
Meeting date: 17 December 2024
Brian Whittle
Surely prevention is about reducing the need for people to seek medical interventions.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Budget 2025-26
Meeting date: 17 December 2024
Brian Whittle
You will not be surprised to hear that many of my questions will be focused on prevention and a whole-systems approach. Once again in the budget, we see a cut to sportscotland’s budget and a cut to active healthy lives funding, which seems to have been a consistent theme throughout my time in the Parliament. That is at a time when we do not have a good health record in Scotland; indeed, it is increasingly poor. Do you not recognise that cutting the opportunities that are available to our young people and to the public in general only increases the strain on our medical centres, hospitals and general practitioner surgeries? Is it not time that we took preventative health seriously?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Budget 2025-26
Meeting date: 17 December 2024
Brian Whittle
If you measure obesity levels, type 2 diabetes levels and other such issues, I would have thought that that would give you an answer.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Budget 2025-26
Meeting date: 17 December 2024
Brian Whittle
When I spoke to the health board and the local council in Ayrshire recently, they both said that we need to stop talking about delayed discharge and start talking about flow through the hospital. In Scotland, generally speaking, people spend too much time in hospital, and we need to deal with that. Surely that is a job for AI, which can be used to predict when people will come in the front end and out the back end. Is it not time that we looked at that, rather than just keeping on talking about delayed discharge?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
National Health Service Dental Services
Meeting date: 10 December 2024
Brian Whittle
First, I should say, as a slight aside, that I have a wee morality issue with our trying to draw people from other countries.
I want to follow up what Dr Gulhane was saying about 40 per cent of people not having access to dentists in the past two years—or, I should say, that 60 per cent have had access—and about that being an improvement. My concern would be, as Emma Harper has said, that 40 per cent would include a high percentage of people in rural areas as well as in Scottish index of multiple deprivation 1 and 2 areas. With regard to the point that Mr Ferris made, it is important that we make policy based not on hearsay but on strict data, so how are we measuring that? Given the importance of our being able to measure where that 40 per cent of people are, so that we can target them, how is that happening?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
National Health Service Dental Services
Meeting date: 10 December 2024
Brian Whittle
That is very welcome, but on the ground in my area, third sector organisations in particular are finding that there are issues with getting access to a toothbrush, let alone dental treatment. It worries me that, potentially, we are not collecting the data that we need in order to understand the direction of travel. I go back to the issue of how we are measuring this. How are we gathering the data? Any information in the particular area of prevention is helpful.
