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 3123 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
Administration of Scottish Income Tax 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Richard Leonard
The fourth item on our agenda is consideration by the committee of reports prepared by the National Audit Office and the Auditor General for Scotland on the administration of Scottish income tax for the tax year 2022-23.
I welcome our witnesses: Stephen Boyle, the Auditor General for Scotland, who is joined by Mark Taylor, who is an audit director at Audit Scotland. I am very pleased to welcome from the National Audit Office Gareth Davies, the Comptroller and Auditor General, and Rebecca Mavin, who is a senior analyst.
We have quite a number of questions to put to you. I will ask Mr Davies to give us a statement but, before that, I invite the Auditor General to address the committee.
Public Audit Committee
Administration of Scottish Income Tax 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Richard Leonard
Thank you. That is helpful. I now turn to Jamie Greene, at his first meeting of this committee.
Public Audit Committee
Administration of Scottish Income Tax 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Richard Leonard
That is helpful. It might be that, in due course, we invite HMRC in and get into more of the detail on that. Perhaps the Auditor General would like to say a word on the issue.
Public Audit Committee
Administration of Scottish Income Tax 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Richard Leonard
Some of the areas that we have discussed in the last hour would presumably fall within the remit of a Scottish income tax board that was seeking to be more strategic in its approach.
Public Audit Committee
Administration of Scottish Income Tax 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Richard Leonard
Okay. We might not be able to rely on the minutes to help us to get to the bottom of that. Anyway, we go to Colin Beattie.
Public Audit Committee
Administration of Scottish Income Tax 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Richard Leonard
I will ask the Auditor General for Scotland about this. When the Scottish Government was in front of the committee last year, we heard that the service level agreement between the Scottish Government and HMRC was being renegotiated. We had been asking the Scottish Government to look at how the renegotiation could include discussion about releasing more of the data that we think should be available, some of which is fairly basic information about the tax gap and the extent to which fiscal drag is having an impact on tax returns. We were led to believe that that was within the scope of those renegotiations.
However, the current service level agreement looks broadly similar to the previous one. Looking at a fairly useful indicator, which is Mr Davies’s point, the fee paid by the Scottish Government to HMRC—which, let us bear in mind, is to support collecting data on £13 billion to £14 billion in tax—is £600,000. Maybe I am looking at this from the wrong end of the telescope, but if it is a question of paying a bit more to get better-quality data, I think that the view of this committee would be that it would be money well spent.
Public Audit Committee
Administration of Scottish Income Tax 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Richard Leonard
The sense I had from the evidence that we took last year from HMRC and the Scottish Government was that maybe the data that we are looking for is not available and that, no matter what the price, it could not be extracted from the system and disaggregated in the way that we think it ought to be. Do you have a view on that? I will ask Mr Davies first and then come to Mr Boyle.
Public Audit Committee
Administration of Scottish Income Tax 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Richard Leonard
Could you give us an example of that?
Public Audit Committee
Administration of Scottish Income Tax 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Richard Leonard
So, do not think that you can just jump on the M74 and pay less tax, Mr Simpson.
Public Audit Committee
Administration of Scottish Income Tax 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Richard Leonard
You mentioned the Scottish income tax board earlier. One of the things that resulted from our work last year was that it now produces minutes. They are not the most illuminating or comprehensive minutes that I have ever read—they are, basically, an outline of the agenda and a couple of bullet points beneath. Nonetheless, one set of those minutes describes the fact that the board is planning to be more strategic. Do you get any sense that that is the case?
