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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
If you search by an individual session, the list of ˿ and committees will automatically update to show only the ˿ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of ˿ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of ˿ 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.
Displaying 3539 contributions
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 20 December 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Basically, then, you are saying that, out of the £143 million, you will generate £74 million, or slightly over 50 per cent, but from the £57 million you will generate only £8 million, which is probably about 13 per cent. That is interesting.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 20 December 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Okay. I got to page 96 of the report, which is on the land and buildings transaction tax. No one has touched on that yet. We are looking at quite a significant decline, from £813 million this year to a predicted £730 million. In other words, there will be an £83 million deficit, which, incidentally, is £1 million more than we will raise from the projected tax increases in the two rates that we have just talked about.
However, you then go on to look at residential tax, which, over the next four years, is forecast to go up by about 56 or 57 per cent—I am just doing the sums in my head. Can you briefly talk us through that? I see that, in paragraph 4.88, you say that you forecast that
“house prices would rise in 2022-23 by 6.0 per cent and transactions fall by 10.8 per cent”,
when, in actual fact, house prices rose by a wee bit more than that and transactions fell by a bit less. Can you talk us through the land and buildings transaction tax element, given that we are talking about a significant amount of money and a significant decrease, going forward into the next financial year?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 20 December 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Fiscal drag and rising earnings—
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 20 December 2023
Kenneth Gibson
But, to a large extent, fiscal drag is the reason for the forecast being £2,211 million higher now than it was a year ago.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 20 December 2023
Kenneth Gibson
In paragraph 3.47, you say that pay in the finance sector in Scotland is growing 3.5 percentage points faster than it is in the rest of the UK. In the next paragraph, you mention that, for a while, North Sea oil acted as a drag on earnings, which are coming back up to the average. Will you talk to us about that and the circumstances around that? Why is that happening? Is that likely to continue?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 20 December 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Thank you for that helpful opening statement.
I will turn straight to your report, “Scotland’s Economic and Fiscal Forecasts”—my questions will be mostly based on that. On page 6 of the summary report, in the very first sentence of the introduction, you say:
“The Scottish Government’s budget next year is set to increase by £1.3 billion from the latest position for 2023-24. This is a rise of 2.6 per cent in cash terms or a 0.9 per cent rise after accounting for inflation.”
The point about the rate of inflation is always a bit of a bugbear for me, because it assumes a gross domestic product deflator for inflation of 1.7 per cent, but that does not bear any relationship to the real impact of inflation on the Scottish budget, given that more than half of the Scottish budget is salaries, which are increasing by significantly more than 1.7 per cent. Why does the assumption continue to be 1.7 per cent, given the differential between the GDP deflator and consumer prices index inflation?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 20 December 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Yes, because we are talking about a real-terms increase in resource, but it is not a real-terms increase in the real world, if you are using a deflator that is so far below the increase in wage settlements, for example.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 20 December 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Okay. I assumed that that was resource only. I did not realise that it was capital and resource.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 20 December 2023
Kenneth Gibson
That is what we are really looking at: how accurate the forecast has been and how behavioural change has impacted in previous years.
Some of the forecasts seem to be pessimistic compared to others. For example, it now seems that we are going have a positive reconciliation in 2025-26 of £732 million. That seems to be very optimistic compared to what was predicted. What explanation do you have for that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 20 December 2023
Kenneth Gibson
This figure does not have a number. It is on page 5 of your summary report—it is right at the beginning.