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 łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees will automatically update to show only the łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of łÉČËżěĘÖ 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 1160 contributions
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Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Paul Sweeney
Issues have been raised about the budget—the £500,000 per annum budget has been described as “a bit light”. On the discussion about the heaviness and the sheer volume of the data, we know that most data is useless, because it is not necessarily reliable. It has not necessarily been collected in the same way or in a rational way, and it may be biased. Are there any critical competences or skills in process or technology that you would like the office to have for it to be meaningful and to give it best effect?
I open that up to anyone who might have a view.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Paul Sweeney
Thank you.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Petitions
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Paul Sweeney
My view is that we are not bound to the petitioners’ specific ask, and an inquiry would give us a useful basis on which to roll the issues forward. We can still retreat from that. In my view, it is not a binary thing, in that we have to agree whether there should be an agency or not. We can certainly take on board—
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Petitions
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Paul Sweeney
When we had the discussion at the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee, the petitioners were not committed hard and fast to the idea of an agency. They were happy to row back from that opening gambit. I do not know whether there are technical rules around this, but I would be content to keep the petition open with an understanding that we could look beyond the simple ask for an agency, because the issue is the concept of who has agency in the system.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Petitions
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Paul Sweeney
If the impact of the petition is that the committee holds a related inquiry, it will have done its job in a way. In that sense, perhaps whether or not the petition is kept open is not such a big deal. I would be content to rest on that.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Petitions
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Paul Sweeney
I have nothing to add.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Paul Sweeney
It is proposed that the patient safety commissioner for Scotland will be a parliamentary commissioner—in other words, they will be appointed by the Scottish Parliament, not by the Scottish Government. Is it preferable that the proposed line of accountability is to Parliament rather than to Government or the national health service as an institution?
I will bring in the front-line representatives on that, starting with Mr McClelland.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Paul Sweeney
I am thinking about the need for a combination of powers and the capacity to gather meaningful insights. Let us take, for example, the transvaginal mesh scandal, where the patient voice was ignored and not heard by the data collecting mechanisms in the Scottish national system, which meant that patients found themselves at a loss to express their concerns beyond petitioning Parliament—it was only then that an inquiry was pursued. Do you see the need to advise change in the way in which data is collected and managed? If you were hearing qualitative insights from patients, but you did not have the quantitative information to verify whether there was a wider national issue, would you be able to recommend that such information would have to start being collected at a certain point in the patient journey in order for us to understand over time whether there was a wider concern? Would you consider such a mechanism necessary?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Paul Sweeney
I want to pick up on the point about resourcing. Budget and head count are one thing, but understanding the competences that you need in the team is critical. There is a huge risk of data inundation and having to make sense of large volumes of information. Have you given much thought to how you can build a process that is resilient enough to draw meaningful conclusions from what is being fed into your office and how you process that? We have a major concern about how that can be managed by what is, initially, such a small team.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Paul Sweeney
That is helpful. It is a help to know about the line to the select committee, which is something that we can reflect on.
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