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 1531 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
What is your opinion as a director general? Is it good practice to allow somebody who is at the top of an organisation that has just been issued a section 22 report from Audit Scotland to be allowed to simply walk away from the process before a public audit hearing?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
This question is aimed at whoever can best answer it. Did the former chair of WICS leave the organisation of his own accord or was he asked to leave and did he receive any financial settlement as a result of his departure?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
Okay, so he resigned or he retired. What was the circumstance?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
And that was accepted and hence the presence of Mr Hinds. Okay; that is understood.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023/24”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
I do, convener.
Good morning, gentlemen and lady. I want to cover a few areas. First, I draw your attention to figure 7 on page 21 of the HMRC report, which is probably one of the more helpful tables in what is quite a lengthy and detailed report. It is certainly more visual, from my point of view; I was wanting to get my head around the analysis that has been done on the Scottish tax base in general, and this table paints a picture that we can look at.
Just to make sure I am being accurate, can you tell me whether the table is saying that higher and top-rate taxpayers in Scotland accounted for 13.3 per cent of taxpayers in 2018-19, and that in 2022-23, the latest year we have available, that figure had risen to 18.1 per cent of the tax base? That is the percentage of the tax base, but alongside that—and what is more important—is the percentage of tax that they are paying, which for the same group has risen from 58.6 per cent to 64.2 per cent. Is such a shift normal? If the percentage of taxpayers in any tax band increases, does the amount of tax that they pay also increase proportionately and at a similar or the same rate?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023/24”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
Does that present any risk at all? For example, when we look at the top rate, we see that less than 1 per cent—0.8 per cent—of Scottish taxpayers paid 17.8 per cent of all tax. In other words, less than 1 per cent of taxpayers account for nearly a fifth of the Scottish tax base. Again, the relevance of this questioning will become clear in my later questions on tax behaviour. You have said that it is a UK-wide phenomenon, but irrespective of that, does that present any risk to any Government when it comes to trying to forecast how much revenue it will get in any given year from its tax income as opposed to from the block grant?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023/24”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
I picked that year, because in an exchange that I had about taxation with Alyson Stafford from the Scottish Government on 25 April last year—we were talking about inward migration to Scotland increasing tax revenues—she made the following statement. This is why it is important, I think, that we understand the numbers, because she said:
“In 2021-22, taxable income in Scotland increased by £200 million as a result of the positive inward migration of taxpayers.”—[Official Report, Public Audit Committee, 25 April 2024; c 7.]
Presumably, that £200 million is part of your £749 million in exhibit 3. If we use the 11 per cent calculation that I highlighted earlier, it would mean that that £200 million would result in only £20 million of net benefit to the Scottish budget. Is that assumption correct? I did not have this data to challenge what was being said at the time, but, nearly a year on, we now have the ability to look at these numbers and see what they mean in real terms to the Scottish Government’s budget.
Perhaps that is a question for the Auditor General.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023/24”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
I was just challenging you on this, because paragraph 60 of your own report makes quite a profound statement. In that paragraph, you talk about the net benefit of the devolution of tax being significantly less than the taxes that are paid, but then you state:
“This is due to the relatively slower economic growth in Scotland.”
It is important that you substantiate that claim, because, as you have said, we will be challenging ministers on that comment.
Thank you very much. I have no further questions.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
Thank you for your clarification.
Were you involved in any of the discussions at any point around the departure or performance of the former chief executive of WICS?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
Were you involved in the telephone call between Donald MacRae, the former chair of WICS, and a number of Government officials, about which he claims that, in that call, approval was given for the severance? He also states that that was confirmed in a second phone call on 20 December, and that the words that were used were “You can do this”. Were you involved in that?
