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 764 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Fiscal Framework (Independent Report)
Meeting date: 11 January 2022
Daniel Johnson
That is helpful. In the interests of time, I will not ask any other questions, but Guto Ifan might want to add something.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Fiscal Framework (Independent Report)
Meeting date: 11 January 2022
Daniel Johnson
[Inaudible.]
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Fiscal Framework (Independent Report)
Meeting date: 11 January 2022
Daniel Johnson
It is important to try to establish critically the purpose and effect of each of the measures around the block grant adjustments, as that is where the bulk of the discussion and debate is likely to be. I want to clarify a few things. In essence, the comparable method seems to involve isolating the ability of a Scottish taxpayer to pay tax in comparison to the average UK taxpayer. On top of that, in the index per capita method, we have a factor to offset the ability of Scotland to grow its population relative to the rest of the UK. Wales has a system that isolates each tax band, which, in a sense, offsets its ability to change the make-up of its tax base. Is that a fair summary of what the three different methods do?
In your report, you say that the review of block grant adjustments is a political decision, not a technical one. I think that I understand that. Therefore, is the political decision the extent to which the devolved Governments are able to influence the size of their population, the extent to which their citizens are able to pay tax and the structure of that tax? Is that a fair summary of what the political drivers of the models might be?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Fiscal Framework (Independent Report)
Meeting date: 11 January 2022
Daniel Johnson
My next question follows on from the answers to some of John Mason’s questions. Although applying the Welsh model in Wales projects that the Welsh budget will increase, it does not do the same thing for the Scottish budget if we apply it in Scotland. It means that the decline is not as severe, but we would still be worse off than if the current set-up had not been put in place.
When the Scottish Fiscal Commission’s report came out, prior to the budget, everyone was taken by surprise at how significant the lag in income tax growth was in Scotland compared to in England. That is the fundamental driver. Why is that the case? Why is income tax growing more slowly in Scotland than it is in not just the UK as a whole but pretty much every other region in the UK, including Wales? What levers are available to the Scottish Government to address that?
Meeting of the Commission
Audit Scotland Budget Proposal 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 December 2021
Daniel Johnson
I wanted to come back to something that Stephen Boyle said. Perhaps he can repeat what he said in his answer.
I am interested in the delay to the audit work. What is the broad balance? We can understand that there is complexity because you are having to do audit work remotely or with social distancing. There is an inherent productivity issue because of the Covid restrictions. What is the split between that issue and the fact that the nature of the activities being undertaken by public bodies, and the way that they are being funded through extraordinary Covid funding, is making your audit work more complicated? In other words, it is more difficult to follow the audit trail because of the nature of the work. Do you have a sense of that split? Have I missed anything else in my assessment of why audit may be taking longer?
12:00Meeting of the Commission
Audit Scotland Budget Proposal 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 December 2021
Daniel Johnson
Is your connection okay, Professor Alexander? Should I come back in with a question, chair?
Meeting of the Commission
Audit Scotland Budget Proposal 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 December 2021
Daniel Johnson
I will leave it there, chair. I have one more question that I may ask later in relation to investment. However, it may be covered by one of my colleagues.
Meeting of the Commission
Audit Scotland Budget Proposal 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 December 2021
Daniel Johnson
Thank you for bringing me in here, chair. I did not want to pre-empt your questions with my follow-ups, which follow directly on from those questions.
Stephen Boyle has quite rightly said in the public domain that it is vital for the Scottish Government to act with transparency in the planned expenditure of Covid-19 money and how that spending is delivered. Indeed, the submission talks about following the public pound. Following on from previous answers, I wonder whether Audit Scotland, too, is doing that. I accept that it might not be about designating people to do the so-called Covid-19 work, but surely you are undertaking certain activities because of Covid-19. A discrete set of individuals or resources might not have been allocated to Covid-19 activities, but you must be able to identify the percentage of work in each audit or in other pieces of work that have arisen because of the pandemic. Are you identifying and tracking that? Do you need to look at what activities you are having to undertake because of Covid-19 to ensure that you can track and manage that work?
Meeting of the Commission
Audit Scotland Budget Proposal 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 December 2021
Daniel Johnson
Chair, the witnesses have just touched on resources. If you are going to ask a question about that, I might be better coming in after that rather than pre-empting your question.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2022-23
Meeting date: 21 December 2021
Daniel Johnson
I have one additional suggestion. It is 2021, but the shop sells no items online. I gently suggest that that opportunity should not be overlooked. Likewise, if you were to find an MSP who had particular expertise in retail, you might want to ask them whether they could provide any observations.
