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
Who was, then?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
Did that person erroneously give approval for the business case?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
However, the individual did not face it. That is the problem.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
Let us ask the new chair of the board. Mr Hinds, if you were sitting in the position that Mr MacRae was in at the time, would you have approved the resignation request or would you have preferred to go down a misconduct route?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
However, given everything that you said in your opening comments about the behaviour of the management at 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
Is there perhaps a risk that Mr Sutherland has been used as an easy scapegoat for all the failings, given that he is no longer part of the organisation?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
He resigned his position.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023/24”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
I would just note, without straying into policy areas, that the numbers themselves show that a relatively small group of people on that top rate are responsible for funding a huge chunk of Government revenue.
When you say that these taxpayers are more mobile, are you talking about their ability to move their residency to another part of the UK, or even outside the UK, or about their ability to shift money around in different ways that results in, say, their paying less tax? What do you mean by “mobile”?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023/24”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
While I have you on the line, Auditor General, I want to ask about paragraph 56 of your own report. I have read it about 100 times and still cannot get my head around it, so perhaps someone in your team can talk me through it.
In that paragraph, which relates to the budget year 2022-23, you state that
“The forecasts originally used ... reduced the budget by £190 million, the net difference between forecast tax foregone by HM Treasury and forecast Scottish Income tax receipts.”
On the next page, the report says:
“Outturn data shows that there was an increase of £259 million, a positive difference of £449 million from the forecast reduction.”
I have no idea what any of that means, so please talk me through it. It seems quite stark, whatever it is.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023/24”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
One of my concerns is that, although taxation has been devolved since 2017-18, there still seems to be no long-term analysis of tax behaviour. In fact, I think that one of the reports—or perhaps both of them—refer to 2027 as the year when we might have a better understanding. That is a decade on from the taxes being devolved, and it is not helping Governments either today or next year make decisions about tax policy.
I am not asking you to comment on the policy itself, but surely the source of this data—that is, HMRC—and the people who analyse it, including the Scottish Fiscal Commission, would be in a better position to inform Government policy if we had that sort of analysis. How can we not know this? You have talked about net inward migration figures being on the increase, for example, but knowing that is irrelevant if we do not know how much extra revenue is being brought in. The number of people is not important; what are important are the amount of money being paid and the net benefit. Is there more that we should be doing in that respect?
