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 737 contributions
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COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 8 September 2022
Brian Whittle
Good morning. Dr Phin, you have opened a whole Pandora’s box regarding my specialist subject of prevention—we could probably take up our whole time on that. However, I want to return to your point that vaccination is a key element of Covid recovery. We are currently vaccinating over-50s again. This is anecdotal but, judging from those whom I have been speaking to, there seems to be a higher number of people deciding not to take the next vaccination than was previously the case.
Referring to your point that we require the level of vaccination to stay high to prevent Covid in future, how do we keep the rates high, and how do we keep the public informed? How do we maintain the importance of vaccination?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 8 September 2022
Brian Whittle
One area that we need to touch on is the level of funding that the Scottish Government should allocate to future pandemic preparedness and long-term resilience. Obviously, inflation and supply chain issues are currently putting pressure on that. Pre-pandemic, through exercise Silver Swan, we knew that the biggest threat to our public health was likely to be some kind of global pandemic, yet we allowed that work to slide. How do we maintain that preparedness? How robust do we need to be in order to make sure that our preparedness is kept at that level? I put that question to Dr Foster.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 8 September 2022
Brian Whittle
I should probably declare an interest: my daughter is a medic in a neonatal unit. I knew how complicated the question was. My point is that priorities shifted drastically during Covid, out of necessity. That has left a major issue that we must deal with at some point. When there is pressure on NHS budgets—as there is—how will all that be considered? Carolyn, do you want to have a go at that?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Communication of Public Health Information Inquiry
Meeting date: 30 June 2022
Brian Whittle
There is no criticism whatsoever. It is easy to look back to 2020 but, if we had to go through it again, would we alter the approach?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Communication of Public Health Information Inquiry
Meeting date: 30 June 2022
Brian Whittle
Good morning, panel. I want to go back to the way in which things were communicated. The Government or Governments—certainly the UK Government—used the term “follow the science”. Generally, there was a lot of comfort to be had for the general population that there was a reason why they were being asked to take such extreme measures to look after public health.
The term “follow the science” was well recognised as a good one. However, did we do enough to explain to people what it actually means? Of course, science is a moving picture. To give a simple example, early on in the pandemic, the First Minister and the Prime Minister stood up and said that there was no evidence that face masks would make any difference, until the science said that they did make a difference. The message about following the science is great, but did we do enough to explain what it actually meant?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Communication of Public Health Information Inquiry
Meeting date: 30 June 2022
Brian Whittle
The question that I am really asking is around that communication. If we had communicated and discussed the potential risk more, would that have prevented more people getting—
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Communication of Public Health Information Inquiry
Meeting date: 30 June 2022
Brian Whittle
It is not a premise; it is a question.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Communication of Public Health Information Inquiry
Meeting date: 30 June 2022
Brian Whittle
I think that you have missed my point, Mr Leitch.
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Communication of Public Health Information Inquiry
Meeting date: 30 June 2022
Brian Whittle
That is my point, though. The phrase “follow the science” was a good message, but we did not communicate properly what it meant and that the science would continually evolve. We did not communicate that message to the general public, so what people thought was, “I need to do this. Oh, but now I need to do this.” Should we have gone further and said, “Follow what the science currently says, but it will evolve as we learn more about the virus”?
COVID-19 Recovery Committee
Communication of Public Health Information Inquiry
Meeting date: 30 June 2022
Brian Whittle
I have been practising that for about a week. I think that it is now acknowledged as a condition and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence published clinical guidelines for it. Her absolute belief is that vaccination was absolutely the way to go. However, I was surprised to hear that there are about 220 confirmed cases, 78 fatalities, 69 probable cases and 70 possible cases. She says that these are relatively very small numbers compared to the vaccine. Nonetheless, these are people who have a condition, who have reacted to delivery of multiple doses of vaccine in a relatively short time. There was inevitably going to be some medical and statistical harm done.
What she was saying is that these are people who have had an adverse reaction to the vaccine and were vilified, pushed away and not listened to at the time, and who have a clinical need. With regard to the issue of communication, her question is, did we communicate the very small potential risk that there was with the vaccine, and, by not doing that, did we create a vulnerability in those few people who had an adverse reaction?
