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 1423 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Youth Parliament
Meeting date: 22 January 2025
Miles Briggs
Most mental health charities are outlining that we need to try to get people off phones and social media. Given the Australian Government’s recent decision, has the SYP taken any view on that matter and the message of getting off devices? How do we facilitate that in Scotland?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Youth Parliament
Meeting date: 22 January 2025
Miles Briggs
Good morning. Thank you for joining us today. Ellie Craig mentioned the Promise champions. The Promise was set out by the independent care review in 2020 and is meant to be kept by 2030. How are Scottish Youth Parliament members involved in progressing that agenda and implementing the Promise?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Miles Briggs
You have touched on what I was leading the question towards, which was the support that is available and who can access it.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Miles Briggs
A number of us who sit on this committee took part in a Social Justice and Social Security Committee inquiry that involved a similar round-table discussion with kinship carers. I remember from that session interesting evidence on the stigma issue, suspicion of social work and concern that if carers did reach out for help, they would be judged and children would be taken off parents.
To what extent has that changed and what needs to change around that? Sometimes it is a difficult conversation, because a parent might be in receipt of the welfare support, and a kinship carer or grandparent, who will be thinking about the child, might not want to see that money taken from them. Is there a passporting issue when support follows the child specifically? What does that look like in your experience? I will bring Liz Nolan back in and then hand back to the convener.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Miles Briggs
Thanks for joining us today, everybody. I want to follow on from some of those lines of questioning about preventative spend and preventative changes. Linda Richards touched on the no-wrong-door principle, but Fiona Bradford mentioned mums reaching out for help and that not being available—in other words, there was no door. Why have we not seen more change in that regard? Also, Claire McGuigan touched upon young people being able to self-refer to her service. I thought that that was quite an interesting point, too. Fiona Bradford, can you talk about when that door has not been there, meaning that there was no potential for preventive work to happen?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Miles Briggs
That is a good point, especially with regard to what has happened around carers and breaks.
Thank you, convener.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Miles Briggs
That would be useful, thank you.
Does anyone else want to come in on that question?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Miles Briggs
Claire McGuigan, do you have data to hand on how many young people have self-referred or what that looks like? That was quite an interesting model.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Miles Briggs
After the meeting, you could perhaps provide us with data and numbers on what that looks like.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Miles Briggs
I will move on to projects that are working within a crisis intervention setting, and I want to ask specifically about informal kinship care settings and relationships. Like most members, I have dealt with cases in which police have brought a child to the child’s grandparent’s house—sometimes in the middle of the night—given the child to the grandparents and said, “This is your situation”, and those grandparents have found that they are not able to access services. Foster families have also told me that they often do not know what is going on at school, as it is the social worker is given that information. There is a lot of opportunity to improve not only information sharing but the support that is available.
What would you like to be done for kinship care families to improve the opportunity not just for information sharing but for access to support? That is the preventative model, as it ensures that the child is supported better. From your experience, what would that look like in the current setting? Linda Richards, I will bring you in, because you talked about family group decision making, which I thought was quite interesting.
