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 ˿ 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.
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
It was actually me who asked the question of the cabinet secretary. He said that the maximum cost in the financial year that is about to commence would be £50 million. What Liz Smith and the rest of the committee are keen to know is how much has been spent to date and whether that will come up in, for example, the autumn budget revision. As the ABR is some months away, if you have any information that you could provide the committee with now, that would be very helpful.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Fair enough.
My final question is based on a question that Daniel Johnson asked. He talked about the £898.7 million that is going out of health and social care. There are seven lines on that, and the £898.7 million includes £257.2 million for the integration of health and social care; £233.5 million for the funding of the real living wage; £120 million for mental health transition recovery, which you touched on; £65 million for implementation of the Carers (Scotland) Act 2016; £27.3 million for free personal and nursing care; £22 million for increased social work capacity in adult services; and £20 million for interim care funding in local authorities.
That is a huge amount of money. Surely some of those things could have been anticipated at the start of the financial year. Are we going to be in a situation in the next financial year where we again see those things being transferred from health and social care to local government? Are you going to look—if not in the next financial year, in the one after that—to have them embedded within that portfolio?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
I know, because every year in the autumn revisions, we have money for education training going from health to education—I think that I pointed that out last year. That has happened for the past five or six years, at least, and it seems a bit odd. I could understand it if it was a one off, but if it will happen year on year, it almost seems dishonest to have the money in one portfolio when we know that it will always be spent in another.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
So how does it form part of the additional £713.4 million if it doesnae matter for the total budget? The finance update says:
“The changes proposed in the Spring Budget Revision result in an increase in the approved budget of £713.4 million … to £57,698.4 million.”
That includes the portfolio changes that we have discussed, the technical changes of £130.6 million that we have just talked about and Whitehall transfers of £80.6 million. I will not ask about those transfers, because I am sure that one of my colleagues will want to do that. If the technical changes do not matter, why is that figure added to the total amount of money that is available to and being spent by the Scottish Government?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
There are a couple of issues that I would like you to talk through. One is the budget for the Scottish teachers’ and NHS pension schemes, which is going up in the current financial year by £495.7 million, which is quite significant. In addition, the budget for education and skills has gone down by £582.4 million. There is clearly a relationship, but will you talk us through the thinking behind that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
As a share of the overall portfolio, it is huge. That is the thing. I am trying to understand why the changes are so huge not only within a year. This is the second set of revisions. You have explained part of the reason, but I am still a bit concerned that the changes are so huge; I wonder how they can possibly be so big in such a short period.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Sorry—are those figures not after the autumn budget revisions have been applied?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
The overall amount of money that the Scottish Government has is up by £713.4 million. The update says that “deployment of available resources” to—not within—portfolios is £502.3 million. I take it that that is additional funding, so where does that additional money come from? We are talking about half a billion pounds. I should really have asked you that before I went into the specifics of the portfolios, so I apologise if that adds a bit of confusion to the discussion.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Thank you. I am glad that you have got another life, because I have been stuck with this one for decades.
I think that the number 1 question that members of the committee want to ask when they get these figures is why specific changes have been made. We get the changes, but we do not really get the reasoning behind them. I also think that it would make life a lot easier for you if that was laid out. As you say, it is very difficult for a minister—not that I have been a minister—who comes to a committee such as this one, because you never know what we are going to ask. There is a mountain of different figures and it is not always easy to keep them all in your head. I think that that would make life easier for all concerned.
I will ask a couple more questions to close this part of the meeting, because we have not really touched on capital much in relation to borrowing. Paragraph 132 of the update says:
“all Reserve availability is being utilised to support the 2022-23 financial position.”
Paragraph 139 says:
“It is ... now highly probable that the full Capital borrowing annual allowance will not be utilised in 2022-23 as discussed in paragraph 125.”
Having jumped from paragraph 132 to paragraph 139, we go back to paragraph 125, which says:
“late underspends will be used in the first instance to reduce the current £450 million borrowing assumption in line with the Scottish Government’s Capital Borrowing policy”.
Where are those late underspends envisaged? What kind of funding are we talking about? How much are we talking about in those late underspends?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
I recognise what you say about the fact that we might be talking about only 1 per cent of the overall size of the Scottish budget, but the changes within the actual portfolios are significant. For example, the funding changes to net zero have brought it down by £230.1 million, whereas we are talking about £1,110.4 million of additional funding for social justice, housing and local government. A huge proportion of funding is being moved within those portfolios. That is not 1 per cent—it is significantly higher than that. That alone is double the total figure.
If we look at it in a two-dimensional way—looking at the budget at the start of the financial year and at the end of the year—we can see that, yes, there might be a 1 per cent differential, but there are still those huge changes within the portfolios, which I find quite difficult to comprehend given that we had the autumn budget revision just a few months ago.
