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 2603 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Colin Beattie
With regard to paragraph 12 on page 8 of the report, I find it astonishing that taxpayers do not have to bother with advising a change of address. I realise that this is not within your powers, but how can the system possibly be robust if people can just change address willy-nilly and vanish?.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Colin Beattie
So it is a notional figure. What is its purpose?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Colin Beattie
Surely it indicates that there is a flaw in the process.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Colin Beattie
Given that the problem has been happening every year since the system was instituted, it must endemic to it.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Colin Beattie
I turn to one or two specific issues. Paragraph 1.2 on page 10 says:
“HMRC calculates the final outturn figure from several components”,
but it does not actually mention what those components are. I do not know whether explaining them will require a lengthy response. If it requires just a short one, that will be fine, but if not, you can perhaps drop us a note.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Colin Beattie
That would be excellent.
Paragraph 1.5 on page 11 says:
“In some areas of the calculation, data are not available in sufficient detail to identify income tax liabilities, reliefs or other adjustments relating to individual taxpayers.”
Again, that will require making a huge estimate.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Colin Beattie
But if it happens every year, there is clearly a flaw in the system.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Colin Beattie
Does that 1 per cent equate to approximately the same as the UK figure?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Colin Beattie
Mr Davies, I have been involved with public audit committees since the Scottish rate of income tax was introduced several years ago. I want to begin with a very simple question, and then I will focus more on the actual report.
One of the things that jumps out of the report is the 70 per cent increase in the number of missing Scottish postcodes. It still represents a small proportion of the taxpayer population, but if it includes large numbers of high-net-worth individuals, it could have a significant effect on the tax collected. What is behind that increase? What is driving the error?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Colin Beattie
I refer back to our previous discussion. There are four bullet points in paragraph 1.23 on page 17 of the report that I find very telling in terms of the robustness of the figures around Scottish income tax. To me, they clearly indicate that there is a real problem in calculating the figures.
We talked about the notional £800 million figure. Bullet point 3 says that the figures that are being used
“do not exclude tax from savings and dividend income”.
You cannot possibly get something accurate out of those figures, because that is not an area within the Scottish Government’s tax authority.
Bullet point 2 refers to the “differing proportions” of types of taxpayers north and south of the border. The figures are completely distorted, because London, for example, is massively overrepresented in terms of the top income tax payers. We do not have that situation in Scotland. If we are using a methodology to calculate the figures that does not account for that incredible difference, how can the figures possibly be accurate?
