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 MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs 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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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 20 December 2022
Kenneth Gibson
[Inaudible.]—on the Scottish budget 2023-24. I warmly welcome to the meeting, in person, Professor Graeme Roy, who is chair of the Scottish Fiscal Commission; Professor Francis Breedon, who is a commissioner on the Scottish Fiscal Commission; and John Ireland, who is the Scottish Fiscal Commission’s chief executive.
Professor Roy, I understand that you wish to make a short opening statement.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 20 December 2022
Kenneth Gibson
I am sorry—I try and put the questions to Professor Muscatelli so that he can decide who answers.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 20 December 2022
Kenneth Gibson
I think that it is a bit of a stretch to suggest that the Scottish child payment going from £10 in April this year to £25 next year somehow represents a real-terms cut.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 20 December 2022
Kenneth Gibson
Yes. I apologise—I should have been clearer about that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 20 December 2022
Kenneth Gibson
That is interesting and is what one would anticipate.
You have said that the underlying structure of the Scottish economy is undergoing profound shifts. You talked about the impact of the pandemic. More people work from home, and some people suffer from prolonged health effects. Have you looked at that? In recent weeks, we have taken evidence from various panels to the effect that, across the UK, around 600,000 people have left the workforce; the corollary is that the number in Scotland is about 60,000. Do you look on that as a long-term consideration or as a one-year or two-year blip, when it comes to your projections of future economic growth and so on?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 20 December 2022
Kenneth Gibson
Thank you. I have just one more question before I open things up to colleagues around the table. Last Thursday, you sent me a letter, which said that non-domestic rates will be levied on a revalued roll. You said that
“significant uncertainties remained throughout the forecasting process.”
Obviously, that is of concern to the Scottish Fiscal Commission. Will you expand on that a wee bit, for the record?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 20 December 2022
Kenneth Gibson
I will follow up before I let Liz Smith in. I am struck by something that you said, Professor Breedon. You said that you assume that the 1p increase in the top rate will increase taxes by only £3 million rather than £30 million because of behavioural changes, but that if we put the rate up by 2p, that amount would double to £6 million. Surely you get to a point where the effect of behavioural change exceeds the additional income level. If the volatility is such that a 1p increase will take 90 per cent off the revenue, surely 2p in the pound—I am quite astonished at that high level of elasticity—would tip it over the edge and you could end up with negative revenue.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 20 December 2022
Kenneth Gibson
Thank you. I have just one final question before I open out the session to colleagues round the table. It is a question about taxation. We see that fiscal drag will increase income taxes quite considerably over the next few years, and you have said that the Scottish Government should continue to consider
“ways that the tax system could be made fairer and better aligned to improving productivity and wellbeing, either through reforms to existing taxes or through the introduction of new taxes”.
By 2027-28, what share of gross domestic product will be taken up by taxes compared with now? Also, you say that the system could be made fairer, but fairer to whom?
We have an anomaly in Scotland whereby people who are earning £45,000 a year, for example, on marginal tax, will pay in the next financial year 42 per cent in income tax and 12 per cent in national insurance, giving a marginal rate of 54 per cent; on the remainder, they will have to pay excise duty, VAT and all the rest of it, depending on their lifestyle. However, for people earning over £50,000, their national insurance level falls to 2 per cent, so their marginal rate is significantly less. How can the tax system be made fairer, given those anomalies?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 20 December 2022
Kenneth Gibson
Professor Muscatelli talked about the importance of the public sector reform programme, which your report says “remains key”. You add that
“there has never been a more important time to consider prioritisation in public services and productivity-enhancing reforms in the public sector”.
The Scottish Government resource spending review published in May suggested that the public service reform programme would be undertaken over the remainder of this session of Parliament with additional outcomes to be reported in the 2023-24 Scottish budget, but there is no mention of it in the Scottish budget. Is that an issue of concern to the panel?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 20 December 2022
Kenneth Gibson
You have also said that the UK Government has announced two new fiscal targets, which
“gives the UK Government more scope to cut capital spending to achieve its deficit rule by treating current and investment spending equally.”
However, you add that that is
“potentially hampering productivity and economic activity in the long run and reducing tax revenues.”
We have seen that there is a £185 million reduction in the Scottish Government’s capital budget for the next financial year. How concerned are you about that?
