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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
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.
Displaying 722 contributions
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Brian Whittle
As I said, I do not want to labour the point but, when a business is under that kind of financial pressure, those decisions have to be made. I am just putting that out there.
I will go on to where my real interest lies. My question follows on from the questions that my colleague Jim Fairlie asked. One thing that Covid has shown us is how much we can change societal behaviour in a short space of time. On Mr Fairlie’s point, many conditions such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and mental health problems can be positively impacted by behaviour. More people in our population die from those conditions than from Covid, although I know that we have been in an emergency situation. In my book, as we come out of the pandemic, we have an opportunity to change the fact that we live in an unhealthy part of Europe. How do we use what we have learned from Covid to change societal behaviour for the betterment of health in Scotland?
10:45COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Brian Whittle
I have to thank you for calling me a professional athlete. I think that that finished a good 2 stone ago.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Brian Whittle
Good morning. I have a quick question about the earlier discussion on hybrid working. A number of companies have made the point to me that, if we end up with a hybrid working system, a lot of companies will still have a 10 or 15-year lease on office space, which they have to take into account. There is a cost in delivering a hybrid working model, but the costs that those businesses had pre pandemic remain. I do not know whether the Government has considered that or taken it into account.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Brian Whittle
Muscle is so much heavier than fat. [Laughter.]
The fact that we have a huge opportunity to reset is a massively important point. That might be contrary to the approach of publishing the sort of data that Mr Fairlie talked about. I would like to think that we could do it from a positive perspective, which means opening up opportunity that has been significantly curtailed during the pandemic. To have that sort of impact, we will need to not just go back to the level of opportunity that we had before but go much further. I want to understand the Government’s thinking on that.
Speaking anecdotally, I am still doing athletics coaching, so I know that we have limited access to the track—it is open only at certain times, which I do not understand. My mother cannot go to her exercise classes at the moment. It is not just about getting back to where we were. It is about how we take this opportunity and go much further.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Brian Whittle
—and that is where I am going with that point, Mr Swinney. The Government’s responsibility is to make that opportunity available, and the messaging comes after that.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Brian Whittle
I do not want to labour this point, but the worry is that, in those particular circumstances, there might be thought of leaning on employees to get them back into the office.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Brian Whittle
But the opportunity has to exist—
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 20 January 2022
Brian Whittle
A report that I was looking at on the incidence of lung cancer over the piece says that half of lung cancer diagnoses are being made at stage 4 and that, during Covid, there has been a 25 per cent reduction in diagnosis and a 25 per cent reduction in treatment. The report also says that a lung cancer screening programme should be required, specifically for over-50s and smokers. I understand that you and the Government have to balance the decisions that you have to make, but where are we with gathering those statistics, considering them and making decisions on that basis?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 20 January 2022
Brian Whittle
I understand that the Government has to balance a lot of different factors. However, we know from the numbers that people who are in hospital with Covid or who tragically lose their lives to Covid predominantly have other issues as well as Covid, which Covid exacerbates. Because this is the COVID-19 Recovery Committee, I am trying to look ahead. It is really important that we do not lose sight of the fact that those who are in hospital with Covid usually also have some other issue.
It might seem a moot point, but health boards have, for example, and understandably, missed their smoking cessation targets because of Covid. How do we balance that and pull that back together? It is almost a chicken-and-egg situation. If we could reduce—[Inaudible.]—causing significant health impacts by treating other issues, perhaps we could reduce the impact of Covid. How does the Government balance those issues when it makes decisions?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Meeting date: 13 January 2022
Brian Whittle
Good morning. I have a couple of questions about data, the first of which is about the collection of data on non-Covid-related issues.
A constituent—a friend of mine, in fact—who, unfortunately, has been diagnosed with stage 3 pancreatic cancer with complications waited six months to get the test. Are we collecting the right data about the stage at which people are being diagnosed with conditions such as cancer, compared with pre-Covid times? Are we collecting data on how many people are being diagnosed with such conditions?
I presume that Professor Leitch would be the best person to answer that question.