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 ˿ 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.
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Displaying 1174 contributions
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Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Paul Sweeney
During our evidence-taking session with Dr Henrietta Hughes, the Patient Safety Commissioner for England, we discussed the issue of escalation. She was emphatic about the need for collaboration and a culture of openness, rather than for an inquisitor who would come in and berate people for failures. That is an important insight to note.
However, where there have been egregious problems, there will need to be very clear recommendations that ought to be implemented. In situations in which there is an area of injustice or an issue that needs to be urgently addressed and which could not simply be left to collegiate encouragement, perhaps there is a need for an escalation process. In responding to my question about that, Dr Hughes said that it was quite early days and that she would not necessarily be clear about what the next step of escalation would be in that instance. Obviously, the reporting line in this case is to Parliament rather than to ministers. Does the minister have a view on how the bill might better define that process of potential escalation, if there is such a lack of co-operation in the future?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Paul Sweeney
I raised the point about data with the English commissioner and asked her about the
“huge risk of data inundation”
and having to make sense of large streams and volumes of information that might have been collected for completely different purposes, might not be comparable, might not have the same baselines and might as a result have accuracy risks. In response to being asked how “meaningful conclusions” could be drawn from the different streams of data being fed into her office and how they would be processed, the commissioner said:
“Having a data and digital function in my team so that we can use and manipulate that data in a way that can bring fresh insight that will help the system to attend and listen to things that it may not have been aware of in the past is key.”
Moreover, Dr Duncan, the chief of staff, said that the commissioner was
“right to say that, without a data analytics function, the novel insights that a commissioner could have would be limited.”—[Official Report, Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, 21 February 2023; c 39.]
Do you agree with that assessment?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Paul Sweeney
Thanks for that. Minister, the point that you hinted at earlier was important. We often hear qualitative insights from patients, as we did in relation to the mesh scandal. The Public Petitions Committee unpacked a lot of that because the system did not respond. Doctors were dismissing patients saying that it was psychosomatic or imagined. A data signal was not being transmitted through the healthcare system to illustrate that there was a problem. That sort of case might be an opportunity for the commissioner to instruct the gathering of data.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Paul Sweeney
Thank you, convener.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Paul Sweeney
Rather than simply take a laissez-faire approach to social media influencing, should the state have a more active role in promoting positive messaging through influencers to direct people in positive directions, particularly through targeted advertising to young people?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Paul Sweeney
You mentioned the opportunity of collaboration across the system, which was also mentioned by the commissioner. She mentioned that partnership working would have value here. Is there an opportunity to further define that in the bill to say that there are obligations or say where we would expect interfaces to work in the system?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Paul Sweeney
To go back to the point about powers, will there be an appropriate element of compulsion for the commissioner to exercise when it is instructing, for example, health boards to gather certain types of data based on complaints that have been picked up that we cannot verify through data? Is there a mechanism whereby the commissioner could say that people should start assessing the issue at primary or secondary care interfaces, to enable us to gain a greater understanding of the issue? Could that be defined?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Paul Sweeney
I do not know whether there is a collective noun for Pauls.
I want to touch on the addictive aspects of unhealthy body image, social media and role models.
You mentioned the education context. A traumatic incident in school could really damage a person’s self-confidence and create destructive behaviours in terms of addictions. I do not necessarily mean addictions to substances, but addictions with regard to creating unattainable goals in terms of physical image. Do you have a view on the reinforcing mechanisms of social media algorithms, and whether they can lead to the real harm that you have identified?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Paul Sweeney
You mentioned earlier that there were some good examples, so can you elaborate on that? Are they examples that we could reinforce from a public policy perspective, through public health advertising to push things in the right direction?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Paul Sweeney
Thanks. That is really helpful.
