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 1001 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Daniel Johnson
That is me, except to thank Professor Heald for name checking the Mirrlees review, which I have been recommending to colleagues in private session.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Daniel Johnson
The convener—quite rightly—puts me under pressure as an Opposition spokesperson to say where the money is coming from. I think that that is a fair challenge. However, I would say the same thing to you. We have numbers that suggest that you are overcommitted by almost £100 million in this year’s budget and there are just four weeks to go. I hear what you are saying about pensions, but is that pension adjustment £500 million?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Daniel Johnson
Where else in the budget are we going to underspend in order to generate the £500 million? Why is that not reflected in the spring budget revision itself? You are basically saying that the spring budget revision is not right and that we have overestimated costings by £500 million. Where is it?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Daniel Johnson
I will pick up on that point. We are four weeks away from the end of the current financial year. I understand what happened with the cost of living payments—there was not the funding that was expected. Nonetheless, table C2.1 sets out clearly that you will overspend by £98 million against budget in order to meet those commitments in the current financial year, although there will be £511 million for next year’s budget from this year’s budget.
I struggle to square those two things. I understand at a high level what you say about devolved taxes and underspends in other areas. I could accept that statement if we were in quarter 2 of the financial year, but we are four weeks away from year-end. Could you provide a bit more detail so that we can have a bit more confidence? I hope that you know where the £500 million is coming from, because that is quite a big sum.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Daniel Johnson
I appreciate that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Daniel Johnson
I just want to briefly correct myself. I stated earlier that the delta was 15 per cent. I should have said 1.5 per cent. I was doing my mental maths too quickly. The flipside of that is that the Government is doing better by an order of magnitude than I was trying to claim.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Daniel Johnson
I thank Professor Heald for his submission, which is a useful insight into the context and purpose of the Scottish Government’s spending review. Professor Heald, my reading of your submission is largely that the review is the right thing to do but that the framework document that has already been published by the Government does not go into sufficient detail on the context and dynamics. Is that the correct reading of what you are saying?
Could you elaborate on the context that has been created by Covid over the period of the review? What are the dynamics of Covid recovery that the review should address, from the point of view both of economic scarring and of what public services will be dealing with?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Daniel Johnson
I want to follow up on your point about the structure and composition of the income tax base in Scotland. In response to a question from the convener, you discussed the particular issues around the intermediate rate and how that works. You said that research had been undertaken. Could you point the committee to that research? This is a pivotal but underexamined point. Are there things that we should be looking at in relation to that issue?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Daniel Johnson
Emma Congreve, I have a question for you about addressing child poverty, which is one of the explicit objectives of the review that is being undertaken. We also have statutory targets. Given that it is such an explicit and overarching objective, will you provide some context for how we are proceeding against those statutory targets and whether we are on track to achieve them, even with doubling the child payment?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Daniel Johnson
Sure—but you do accept this, though. I understand how we got here; it is a matter of reconciling the budget from this year into next. What if we had not got the information that you have just provided orally, that there was a gap? In future years, we should be aiming not to require that narrative to reconcile one year’s budget moving into the next year’s budget. Is that a fair comment?
