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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Displaying 3573 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 21 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
I can understand your argument about the UK, and, obviously, that is something that I subscribe to. However, if people earning over £43,662 are going to be confronted by a 54.25 per cent marginal rate of tax, perhaps the threshold should have been increased, rather than allowing the fiscal drag to ensnare more people in that tax net.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 21 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
There has been a lot of debate and discussion on the resources that are available to the Scottish Government, but there has not been much debate on capital and infrastructure. Everyone accepts the figure on page 2 of the budget: there is a 9.7 per cent reduction in real terms of the draft capital. That is backed up by the SPICe report, on page 34. That has significant implications for Scotland’s capital programme, particularly as the cost of materials is still much higher than the general rate of inflation. What projects in Scotland are likely to be put on hold, from repairing fewer potholes to building more schools? What are the implications of that severe cut in capital resources?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 14 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
We are scrutinising this budget, not the budget that we might like to see.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 14 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
In that case, we will go straight to questions. I will base my initial questions on the statement that Professor Roy has just made. You basically said that we must look at public service reform, and that we must be genuine in that reform. However, the issue will be about how we bring in genuine reform and move towards prevention, more efficiency and better use of the public pound, and whether such reform will be seen simply as cuts, and so on. Could you address how we can approach that?
The second issue is, regardless of whether we do that and regardless of whether it is successful, there is still a long-term issue around the sustainability of the public finances and the relative divergence in tax revenues between Scotland and the rest of the UK. Following on from that—I will ask David Eiser to comment on these matters, too—what can we do to reverse some of the issues with productivity that we have in Scotland? If the economy was 1 per cent more productive per year than it is now, for example, we would not face this problem for much longer. How do we address those broad issues? I ask those questions before we get into the meat and drink of the budget itself.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 14 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
David Eiser touched on the Scottish Fiscal Commission assessment, which sits half way between the Scottish Government’s and the UK Government’s assessment of the figures. In paragraph 9, the Scottish Fiscal Commission says:
“Overall the Scottish Budget in 2022-23 is 2.6 per cent lower than in 2021-22, after accounting for inflation the reduction is 5.2 per cent.”
As David Eiser said, one of the issues is that that includes the drawing down of resources. What are the implications for the long-term sustainability of Scottish finances, given the fiscal framework that we have to work within, which has become increasingly tight through inflation and so on?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 14 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
You touched on the issue of demographics, which was discussed a lot in the session with the previous witnesses and in the pre-meeting private session.
David Eiser, perhaps you could touch on that. I would also be happy for you to respond to any of the points that have been raised. We discussed, for example, the fact that immigration is down, perhaps because of Brexit; the birth rate is down; and even the number of younger people who are in tertiary education is down. However, we still have a high—in fact, a record—number of vacancies in Scotland. Around 100,000 people, or roughly 4.5 per cent of the working population, are unemployed. If those people were in productive employment, that would make a difference. What could we do to upskill those people in order to improve market participation and reverse some of the trends that we currently see?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 14 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
You were going to say something about capital, David.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 14 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
I sometimes think that we look too much at what is happening in the UK and that we should look further beyond our borders, where there might be many more ideas for us to look at.
That brings us to the end of our time. I thank our guests, David Eiser and Graeme Roy, for again providing thought-provoking and helpful evidence for our scrutiny.
We will allow our witnesses to leave and then I will take a couple of minutes to update members of the committee on a couple of important matters.
Meeting closed at 13:01.Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 14 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
Indeed.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 14 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
The decline in the number of younger people in the labour force has come up quite a lot. We discussed it to some extent in our private session before the meeting. What is the reason for that decline? Is it that more young people are in higher education? Is it our lower birth rates, or the fact that there are fewer young migrants in the population? Why is the situation here so different from that in the rest of the UK?
