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 ˿ and committees will automatically update to show only the ˿ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of ˿ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of ˿ 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 2161 contributions
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Jim Fairlie
Guys, your responses keep on throwing up more questions than answers.
I will come to Professor Holden first, if he does not mind. This has nothing to do with the committee’s inquiry, but your comments sparked some interest in me. You talked about ancestral genomes. What time range does that ancestry cover? Does it depend on the particular genome? That question is purely for my own interest.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Jim Fairlie
Okay.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Jim Fairlie
I am concerned by the fact that you have all talked about the lack of funding next year. As someone with a background in sheep farming, I know that antimicrobial resistance is a major problem in that sector, because of the overuse of antibiotics, wormers and all that stuff. What work are you doing on that? Is that the kind of thing that you could put to Government? I know that it sounds like you are selling something, but, in effect, that is what you are doing. Can you say to Government, “This is what we’re working on and, if we can keep the genomic service going, we can put something more in place that will add value to what we’re already doing”? I know that it sounds ridiculous to have to say that, but can you put something like that to Government to maintain your funding?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Jim Fairlie
Do you want to expand on that? [Laughter.]
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Jim Fairlie
What is it?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Jim Fairlie
That can give you information to pass on to health boards to say, “This is what it looks like, and this is what we think is coming.”
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Jim Fairlie
Right. What does it do?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Jim Fairlie
Yes—that is probably an important part of it.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Jim Fairlie
That is excellent. Professor Peacock, did you want to come in?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 15 December 2022
Jim Fairlie
Grand. Peter Singleton wants to comment, but I will put two more questions or thoughts to the witnesses before he does so.
First, do you now have a resource that can be upscaled if necessary? Secondly, I ask George Ponton to say how you get community sampling done. I am thinking of specific small communities. We have often heard that areas of deprivation were the hardest hit by Covid, and in some communities the uptake of vaccinations has not been high enough. Are you in a position to be able to go to specific areas to find out whether a community is in trouble or not?
I will bring in Peter Singleton first, and then the other witnesses can comment on those two points.