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
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency”
Meeting date: 10 February 2022
Craig Hoy
It looks as though the ransomware attack was quite carefully timed, coming as it did at midnight on Christmas eve. We are aware from the report that the staff member who was responsible was unable to contact any member of senior management to escalate the issue. Have you explored whether SEPA now has in place contingency plans to ensure that, should such a situation arise again, that channel of communication will be open and available?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Craig Hoy
Mr Davies, in your opening remarks—or perhaps just after—you said that there was no reason to predict that the levels of income tax debt attributable to Scotland would be any different from those in the rest of the UK. How could you come to that conclusion if no substantive analysis has been conducted?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Craig Hoy
Good morning. The report examines the impact of Covid-19 on HMRC compliance activities. It says:
“COVID-19 has continued to have an impact on HMRC’s compliance and debt management activities. Across the UK, there were 29% fewer civil compliance cases opened and 26% fewer cases closed in 2020-21 than in 2019-20”.
Can you give us a snapshot of why that is? Is it because internal processes in HMRC have been impacted by Covid—for example, due to people working from home, which means that there is less capacity—or is it because the outside world has become more complex because of the pandemic?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Craig Hoy
People who struggled to pay tax during that period are now paying their present tax and have therefore almost forgotten about that period, which may impede the recovery of that tax. Do you have a concern that, in capacity terms, HMRC will be so busy in its forward-looking work that it may end up not fully delving into that period retrospectively?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Craig Hoy
We talked about a separate analysis of Scottish compliance and how the effort and cost would perhaps be too great to do that. Do you have any insight as to whether there are plans to make available an analysis of Scottish income tax debt? Is such work being undertaken, and would the Scottish Government, HMRC or yourselves benefit from that?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Craig Hoy
Would you expect there to be an upscaling of those activities on compliance and debt management as we come out of the pandemic?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Craig Hoy
I will ask one quick question of Mr Boyle. In your report, you note that further analysis of taxpayer behaviour
“along with the relative success of compliance activity in Scotland and the Scotland-specific tax gap”
would help the Scottish Government to
“assess whether any Scottish income tax compliance risks are emerging”.
Do you have any concept of, and will you elaborate on, what those risks might be and their potential scale?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 3 February 2022
Craig Hoy
The risk might be someone buying a bolthole in Berwick-upon-Tweed and registering themselves there while working in Edinburgh, for example.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 27 January 2022
Craig Hoy
Paragraph 17 of the section 22 report refers to the acting commissioner’s assessment that
“staff were not equipped fully to fulfil the Office’s statutory functions.”
The external auditors therefore recommended in their annual audit report that a formal training programme and workforce planning arrangements should be put in place. In light of that, can you confirm whether a skills gap exists in the organisation and, if so, in which specific areas?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”
Meeting date: 27 January 2022
Craig Hoy
I go back to the size of the organisation. I will not fall back on my rusty Latin to make the point, but I am thinking of an old episode of “Yes Minister” in which Sir Humphrey Appleby explains to the minister the full structure of permanent secretaries and undersecretaries and the full complexity of Government. The minister asks, “Do they all type?” and Sir Humphrey answers, “No. Mrs McKay is the typist.”
Considering the complexity that the organisation deals with and the fact that only one individual has experience of MSP complaints, is there a concern that it is not properly resourced to do its job, and would vacancies have a significant negative impact? Should we be looking longer term at the resource that the corporate body provides to the organisation?
