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 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
What about Scotland? What kind of lessons can we learn for our budget from what the UK has done? We have had six weeks to reflect on what has happened, and the Scottish ministers will be setting out their proposals from Thursday. What pitfalls should they avoid and what kinds of things can they do in a positive sense, given the policy restrictions, of course?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
The Institute of Fiscal Studies has said that policies have been led by the OBR. We will ask it about that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
I have a final question on taxation before I turn to colleagues. You state in your submission that the amount of gross domestic product that is raised in tax will be 36.2 per cent by 2026-27, which will be its highest since the early 1950s. You also state that taking his past two budgets together, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has
“raised taxes by more this year than in any single year since Norman Lamont and Ken Clarke’s two 1993 Budgets in the aftermath of Black Wednesday.”
You wrote the submission on 27 October. What impact do you think that will have on future growth projections, given that you have had six weeks in which to analyse the situation further?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
We shall end this evidence session on that very positive note. I will not ask for the name of the hotel.
I thank Mr Hughes and his colleagues for taking the time and trouble to come all the way to Edinburgh. That is really appreciated in the current circumstances, and it definitely gives you lots of brownie points from the committee. We much prefer to take evidence face to face, if we possibly can.
I also thank you for all your evidence. We could have asked a lot more questions if we had the time, but we have a full agenda today. Thank you for coming to see us, and we hope to see you again before too long.
Our next witness will be Carl Emmerson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who will join us remotely. I suspend the meeting to allow final connection checks to take place. We will be back at 10.29 for a 10.30 start.
10:26 Meeting suspended.10:30 On resuming—
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
On 27 October, Paul Johnson said that the budget was “very disappointing” and that it showed that household income would be “pretty stagnant” at around 0.8 per cent growth this year. He went on to say,
“This is actually awful,”
pointing to
“High inflation, rising taxes, poor growth keeping living standards virtually stagnant for another half a decade.”
In his speech that day, he went on to say:
“Average gross earnings could have been some 40% higher had pre crisis trends continued.”
How does that compare to other western countries?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
Over the past few years, how accurate has the Office for Budget Responsibility been, compared with the SFC? There are significant differences in the forecasts for the next five years; the SFC predicts that the tax take in Scotland in five years will be £486 million more than the OBR has predicted. It is interesting that the OBR predicts that £78 million will come in from Scottish landfill tax while the SFC predicts only £18 million because of the impact of policy. That is a £60 million difference, which is quite a huge difference for that tax. To help us to consider how the OBR is doing relative to the SFC, will you say how accurate the two organisations’ predictions have been over the past few years?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
We will soon see.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has been quite excoriating in its critique of the UK budget, and I noticed that one of the comments was that
“A crucial ingredient in this year’s policy decisions has been the way in which OBR forecasts appear to have driven policy.”
You touched on that a wee bit in response to Michelle Thomson’s questions, but what can and should the UK and Scottish Governments do differently in terms of fiscal policy? There has been a lot of critique—given your role, I understand that—but do you have more positive suggestions for how we can make things better?
11:15Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
What should Scotland’s spending priorities be, given what Daniel Johnson said about there being a jump in resources this year, but a real-terms decline in the following two years? Sustainability of the public finances is, obviously, a major issue for us in Scotland.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 7 December 2021
Kenneth Gibson
One issue is that the OBR does not necessarily have access to the data that it requires to look at specifically Scottish circumstances. Are there any data streams that could be added to make forecasting in a Scottish context more accurate?
