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 1215 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Tom Arthur
Laura Parker can come in with those details.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Tom Arthur
I do not have a specific set of numbers that I can share with you, but I anticipate that the successful outcome would, as you highlight, lead to a net gain for the Scottish economy and, indeed, the public finances. The exact timescales in which that will be delivered will, of course, be influenced by a number of factors, including individual commercial decisions and the overall macroeconomic environment in which we find ourselves. However, to come back again to the key point, I note that this is about seeking to incentivise investment that would otherwise not take place; clearly, economic benefit and gain would come from that. However, I am not in a position to give specific timescales or to forecast when we would get a return on the investment.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Tom Arthur
You would expect me to say in answer that a priority for the Government is to ensure that our workforce is skilled and able to take up the new opportunities. There is broad recognition that we have a highly skilled workforce in Scotland, which is reflected in a range of metrics—not least of which is our consistent success in attracting foreign direct investment.
Laura Duffy might want to add something specifically on how that thinking will link up with green freeports and how the business cases have been taken forward.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Tom Arthur
You must forgive me—I am here specifically to speak about green freeports. As I am not the lead minister on investment zones, I do not have the information in front of me. However, I would be more than happy to ask that a response be provided in writing to address any further points that you want to articulate on the matter.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Tom Arthur
There is a range of avenues for providing resource. As I said, that can happen under the planning system, when there is justification in planning matters for resources to be accessed as part of a development that is taking place. There are public resources, such as the capital allocations to local government.
As always, we will continue to have dialogue with local government. More broadly, that has been taken to a new and strengthened level across Scotland following the Verity house agreement. Such discussions will continually take place. If particular areas of pressure are identified and we need to consider solutions that go beyond what an individual local authority or group of local authorities was capable of, we would have those discussions at that point, just as local authorities routinely raise a number of areas.
We recognise that what we are seeking with regard to the creation of jobs and the development of land presents a huge opportunity. We also recognise that significant economic development can be attended by a range of challenges, so we will continue to engage. We are not taking an approach of saying, “On you go,” and leaving local government and the areas to it. We will continue to engage, and we will look to understand any challenges that emerge and identify solutions in partnership.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Tom Arthur
I am grateful for the committee’s scrutiny and have no further comments.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Tom Arthur
The provisions around avoidance are general avoidance provisions. Laura Parker might want to come in and speak to those, because it is an important point in which the committee will be interested.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Tom Arthur
As has been touched on, we are in a situation where, subject to the order being passed, we hope that tax site designation would take place between HMT and HMRC in the near future, which would allow for the next stage. We continue to have active dialogue and engagement, and there is joint decision making between Scottish and UK ministers. Laura Duffy, do you want to add to that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Tom Arthur
Yes, of course. As I said, there is continued close dialogue and engagement, which will inform any decisions, and earlier we recognised the approach that we have taken from the outset with regard to parity.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Tom Arthur
As you correctly identified, the SFC stated that the relief would be below the materiality threshold of £5 million. Given that such things are demand driven, it can be challenging to forecast with the degree of precision that we would like. However, there is an expectation that many of the transactions that would take place would be leases rather than conveyances. If we look at leases as a proportion of total LBTT revenue for Scotland in 2021-22, for example, they work out at about 3 per cent overall. Therefore, we are talking about relatively small sums of money, but such reliefs can be very meaningful and impactful with regard to decisions on whether individual transactions should take place. Of course, we should bear it in mind that we anticipate that the transactions would not take place were the relief not in place.
