Chamber and committees

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.

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.

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Public Audit Committee

Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts” and “Scotland’s public finances: Challenges and risks”

Meeting date: 23 February 2023

Colin Beattie

Mention was made of headroom, which I interpret as keeping a margin so that, if there are fluctuations in funding and so on, we can remain within our balanced budget—which, as a Government, we have to do. To what extent is that headroom or margin impacted by sustainability issues in relation to allocations of funding from the UK Government? In other words, are we saying, “We have this budget, but we’ll have to keep 5 per cent of it in case there’s a change during the year”? Is it only at the end of the year that we can allocate the funding, because we know that we will have to keep it until then? Are we in that situation?

Public Audit Committee

Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts” and “Scotland’s public finances: Challenges and risks”

Meeting date: 23 February 2023

Colin Beattie

Now we can look at one or two of the issues around sustainability. You published a briefing paper on the Scottish Government’s financial sustainability for 2022-23. In light of that, how is sustainability being managed? How has that developed? How has that moved on to be better managed than it has been in the past? I recognise that there are all sorts of issues to consider, including the Scottish rate of income tax. Sometimes, the estimates of how much we would get from that have been fairly dramatically incorrect. How are you managing the sustainability position, going forward?

Public Audit Committee

Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts” and “Scotland’s public finances: Challenges and risks”

Meeting date: 23 February 2023

Colin Beattie

The permanent secretary mentioned that you were engaged in discussions with the Treasury. Does the Treasury understand the risks that the Scottish Government must take in its budget and the instability that that creates? That instability is not just at national Government level; it permeates down to local level, because local government cannot be sure what funding it will get.

I talk to many community groups that say, “Please give us three years of funding. Tell us what we are going to get for the next three years”. That cannot happen, because local government does not necessarily know what it will have; nor does national Government. That is not good government; it is not a good process. What is the Treasury saying? Does it have a solution for that? Does it have something that might support our Government better?

Public Audit Committee

Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts” and “Scotland’s public finances: Challenges and risks”

Meeting date: 23 February 2023

Colin Beattie

You talked about risk and the fact that the Government accepts and manages risk when setting the budget. Clearly, there is a risk that you might overspend because you might get reductions in funding in year and so on. Is there a risk matrix as such? Who makes the decision on whether the risk is acceptable?