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 1195 contributions
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Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
Towards the end of your concluding remarks, you said that there was a strong argument against having a one-size-fits-all model in Canada, due to geographical variation. I feel that Scotland, too, has significant geographical variation. How does your comment about Canada fit with recommendation 1, which is on care services being provided on a consistent basis, and recommendation 3, which is on taking
“A clear ‘one system, one budget’ approach”?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
I would like to ask Professor Glasby first. The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities has repeatedly said that improvements to social care need to be made now. I heard you say earlier that, initially, things are likely to get worse. Therefore, these changes will only disrupt these improvements. Could more immediate action be taken to address existing social care issues? Might the NCS jeopardise these changes?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
My question is for Sir Harry Burns. You have spoken about data. One of the things that I am frustrated by is the lack of data. We need to find out what we have now, identify the change that we are going to make and what change we would then see in the data, and then robustly collect that data. I know that you said that you had stopped on that, but I would like to hear a bit more about it.
10:30Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Petitions
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
I feel that PE1890, on finding solutions to recruitment and training challenges for rural healthcare in Scotland, is particularly important. We know, for example, that it is very difficult to recruit GPs, and we know that nursing provision across Scotland is not uniform. We have significantly worse recruitment in rural areas than we have in urban areas. I could go on with more and more examples.
PE1890 should be brought in front of the health boards. There are rural health boards that should be explaining what they are doing right now. We could follow that up with a meeting with the cabinet secretary to find out what is happening centrally. That is a really important area that we have not got a grasp on, unfortunately.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Petitions
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
My only concern about that is that there are health boards that do not come in front of us and there are health boards that hide—I do not want to use that word, but I will. We need to ensure that rural health boards come in front of us and that we get all health boards in front of us, so that we can have that discussion directly. In one of our previous sessions, the health boards that appeared were ones that were not under great scrutiny. It is very important that we get everyone here.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
National Care Service (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
Thank you for the presentation on the work that you have done. I have one question, which is about your methodology. You excluded papers that were published in languages other than English, but that presents a problem. Japanese is the dominant language in Japan, French is the dominant language in France and German is the dominant language in Germany—we could keep going like that. How many papers—and how many for each language—were excluded on that basis? If you excluded so many papers, how can you say that your research on those particular countries is robust?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Racism in Scottish Cricket (Independent Review)
Meeting date: 4 October 2022
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
Having listened to what has been said, am I right in saying that, essentially, no changes have been made? You say that you are looking to do things or are thinking of doing things, that this is sort of where you want to go and that you have a governance review, an EDI strategy and so on. However, the evidence that I have heard suggests that, right now, the processes and structures have not really been put in place.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Racism in Scottish Cricket (Independent Review)
Meeting date: 4 October 2022
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
I have been listening with interest, and I am really quite angry and upset. The publication of the report is not a dark day for Scotland; what happened was a dark day for Scotland. The idea of trying to hide behind societal issues is not good enough. I have a feeling that the issue is not being taken seriously enough and that things are not going forward at the pace that we want them to.
My first question is for Gordon Arthur. Where is the human resources officer? Why has a human resources officer not been appointed?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Racism in Scottish Cricket (Independent Review)
Meeting date: 4 October 2022
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
You have said that you do not need a full-time HR manager because there are only six of you, and you have talked about a full-scale review of all the people and all the things that you need to do. That does not seem to balance. What work is going into place now to ensure that there is greater diversity not just within Cricket Scotland but in your volunteers and in the encouragement to get players to play at the top level to make Scotland successful?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Racism in Scottish Cricket (Independent Review)
Meeting date: 4 October 2022
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
Gillian Mackay has asked about timescales, and Paul O’Kane has talked about going in and speaking to communities. We are looking at structures and processes for increasing diversity, for new appointments and so on. Despite all the issues that have arisen, I am not getting the sense that you have done these things or that all of this has happened already. Instead, I am getting the sense that you are just looking to do them.
