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 łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees will automatically update to show only the łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of łÉČËżěĘÖ 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 893 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Craig Hoy
You say that the variation is not particularly significant, so you would not have concerns, but someone in Scotland who earns ÂŁ50,000 will pay ÂŁ1,489.10 more in tax than someone in the rest of the UK who earns ÂŁ50,000. Given that there is always compliance, evasion and avoidance, at what level of variance would you start to have significant concerns and think that you would need to probe deeper into the data?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Craig Hoy
The Scottish Government has taken the decision to raise tax on middle-income earners upwards. You identified high-net-worth individuals or millionaires. Let us take the example of a millionaire with a house in North Berwick and a house in Berwick-upon-Tweed who works in London and Edinburgh. That is a conceivable case. Is that now a grey area that concerns you?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Craig Hoy
My first question relates to the comment in the NAO report that
“HMRC has limited performance data available about its compliance activities in Scotland.”
Why is that the case, and what, if anything, is being done to try to rectify the situation?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Craig Hoy
If I fly in and out of the country from Buenos Aires, you can probably monitor that and count the days much more easily than if I go between North Berwick and Berwick-upon-Tweed. How do you monitor that? Do you just take what people say at face value and take their word for it?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Craig Hoy
Thank you.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of South Lanarkshire College”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Craig Hoy
One would assume that the board is fully aware of its role and responsibilities for good governance. The board was appointed on 4 November but members were not fully inducted until the beginning of February 2022. Will you talk me through what the normal induction process would cover and what the risks are of having board members who have not been through that process?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of South Lanarkshire College”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Craig Hoy
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but given the seriousness of the issues that were at play in the college, would not it have been far better for the college to have made sure that the board was fully aware of its roles and responsibilities at that stage?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “New vessels for the Clyde and Hebrides: Arrangements to deliver vessels 801 and 802”
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Craig Hoy
Let us bypass some of what then happened and fast forward to June 2018. It is reported in annex B of paper 3 that FMEL asked the Scottish Government to intervene to instruct CMAL to take part in an expert determination process to resolve the growing dispute between the procurement agency and the yard. FMEL managers said that CMAL did not do that because CMAL had something over ministers—that they had forced CMAL to do the deal with Ferguson Marine in the first place.
Reflecting on your report’s account of that period, FMEL’s management says that you have accepted the Government’s “false narrative” and “fabulous propaganda” that the failure of the project was supposedly down to FMEL and not down to flaws that flowed from the procurement and design process being rushed because ministers wanted McColl’s yard to be given the contract and they wanted that to be done quickly.
In his submission, Mr McColl goes on to say that the Government did not intervene to instruct CMAL to take part in an expert determination process because that would have been “very damaging” to the Government, because CMAL’s board had threatened “to resign en masse” and blow the lid off what really happened in relation to the awarding of the contract.
Have you seen any evidence of that? Rather than going down the route of an EDP, would that not have been another point at which the Government could have revisited the procurement and delivery of the ferries?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “New vessels for the Clyde and Hebrides: Arrangements to deliver vessels 801 and 802”
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Craig Hoy
There was a final point when the procurement process could have been reopened and a different decision could have been taken, which was when the Government determined that it would nationalise the yard. In your report, you say that the decision to nationalise the yard was taken
“without a full and detailed understanding of the amount of work required to complete the vessels, the likely costs, or the significant operational challenges at the shipyard.”
Again, the Government pressed on regardless. How concerned are you that the Government proceeded with nationalisation on that basis? What were the financial consequences and the consequences relating to the on-going construction of the vessels?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “New vessels for the Clyde and Hebrides: Arrangements to deliver vessels 801 and 802”
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Craig Hoy
I have a final question. Last week, you said that one material witness from FMEL who wanted to give evidence as part of your audit and investigation could not do so because they had signed a gagging order with the Scottish Government. If the Scottish Government agreed to lift the non-disclosure agreements, would you be willing to reopen your lines of inquiry and produce an annex to your report?
