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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Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 6 October 2021
Kevin Stewart
Thank you. It is a little strange to be back in a committee room. I have participated in committee meetings over the past while, but this in-person stuff is going to take some getting used to again.
I am grateful for the opportunity to give evidence to the committee on how the Scottish Government is supporting autistic people.
The Scottish Government published its plan “Learning/Intellectual Disability and Autism: Towards Transformation” in March. The plan considers the actions that are needed to shape supports, services and attitudes to ensure that the human rights of autistic people and people with learning and intellectual disabilities are respected and protected. We are taking forward exciting new leadership and engagement plans with central roles for autistic people and people with a learning disability, putting them in the driving seat.
The Scottish Government has just published the “Evaluation of the Scottish Strategy for Autism”. The evaluation concludes that the strategy delivered valuable resources and services but that more work needs to be done to meet the Government’s ambition of allowing autistic people to be supported to live productive lives and of seeing change at the local level.
In response, I was delighted to announce £650,000 this financial year for tests of change on adult neurodevelopmental pathways for diagnosis and support. I also announced new funding of £425,000 to trial the Scottish Government’s new learning disability and autism leadership and engagement work, and £400,000 for the understanding autism project charity funding for a second year.
The Scottish Government also established the national autism implementation team, which supports health and social care partnerships to consider best practice and improved service in the redesigning of autism diagnostic services.
On Wednesday 8 September, the Scottish Government published the “National Neurodevelopmental Specification for Children and Young People: Principles and Standards of Care”, and on 14 September I announced £5.25 million for NHS boards to build professional capacity to support children and young people with neurodevelopmental support needs.
Additionally, we have listened to the calls for a commissioner and have committed to publishing a learning disability, autism and neurodiversity bill and to creating a commissioner to uphold and protect the rights of autistic people and other people with neurodevelopmental difference. We are committed to that and will commence scoping work on the bill shortly.
Let me be clear that although money is always important, this is not just about money. It is about how we treat people with neurodevelopmental difference in our communities, our workplaces and our schools. It is about innovation, focus and working together across national and local divides to provide solutions that work for the people we are here to serve. That is what our new engagement will support and, as members will be aware, I am committed to ensuring that the voices of those with lived experience are at the heart of all that we do.
I am interested to hear the views of the committee and I look forward—or maybe not—to your questions.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 6 October 2021
Kevin Stewart
I have a figure for the number of autistic people in Scotland; I do not have a figure for the number who are diagnosed each year, but I can see whether we can provide that for the committee.
According to the Scottish Government-funded microsegmentation of the autism spectrum research project, whose report was published on 26 March 2018, there are approximately 44,133 autistic people in Scotland, with a national Scottish autism prevalence rate of 1.035 per cent. Around 32.7 per cent of autistic people also have a learning disability. As I have said, I do not have figures for diagnoses per annum to hand, but we will see what we can do to provide the committee with that information.
