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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Displaying 4005 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 10 January 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Indeed.
Okay, I have taken up more than enough time. I have more questions, but it is time to let other members in. Liz Smith will be first, followed by Daniel Johnson.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 10 January 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Thanks for confirming that we will get an updated financial memorandum—that is very good news.
I have a second question about that. You talked about £100 million extra going into national care service pay, which will be very welcome. For every £1 increase in hourly pay for care staff, what is the impact on the Scottish budget? For example, if the pay was to go up from £10.90 to £11.90, what would be the additional impact on the Scottish budget? That is significant, and I imagine that the issue is likely to come up over the next few weeks.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 10 January 2023
Kenneth Gibson
No. It is just about the impact on the Scottish budget of every additional £1 in hourly pay.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 10 January 2023
Kenneth Gibson
We will move on from that. You have raised really interesting points. I will certainly take them up with other people.
There is a 6.7 per cent increase in the general staffing budget. You have explained some of that, but the SPCB’s submission says:
“Staff pay including use of contractors is budgeted at £37.3m, a net increase of £2.3m … in cash terms”.
What is the breakdown between contractors and our own staff?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 10 January 2023
Kenneth Gibson
What developments do you expect from that to enhance public engagement? If you are employing three staff to enhance public engagement, what improvements in it do you envisage?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 10 January 2023
Kenneth Gibson
It is okay—that is a sound explanation. I should have thought of the national insurance issue, because you mention it in the document in relation to the overall budget. Thank you for explaining that.
I am going to ask about the annual survey of hours and earnings—the ASHE index. Given that the GDP deflator is 3.2 per cent, and consumer prices index inflation is 10 or 11 per cent, how do you arrive at that ASHE figure? I take it that it is about a year out of date. Is that right?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 10 January 2023
Kenneth Gibson
What is the point in that? No one would say to any other group of workers—including in the Scottish Parliament—that they were just going to use the inflation rate as it was in late 2021 for calculating pay. How has that figure been calculated and why has that approach been adopted? Who was consulted on that? It seems an anomaly.
The letter says, with regard to staff provision, that
“Based on the recent ASHE publication this derived an index of 4.1%”.
However, recognising current inflation figures, the SPCB has opted to use only the average weekly earnings index of 5.6 per cent in order to uplift the general staff provision for members. Why is that not being used for ˿ but it is being used for everyone else? You said that there was no virtue signalling, but it is clear that there is.
I add another point. If the ASHE index says that because inflation is 11 per cent—although by the same time next year inflation might be 3 or 4 per cent, or possibly even lower—˿ should get a 5 or 6 per cent pay rise, we will just end up with lots of headlines about it being an inflation-busting pay rise, which, by that time, no one else in the public sector will be getting. That seems daft to me from a public relations or practical point of view—or indeed any point of view.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 10 January 2023
Kenneth Gibson
We continue our evidence taking on the Scottish budget 2023-24. I welcome to the meeting John Swinney, the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Covid Recovery. He is joined by the Scottish Government officials Alison Cumming, director of budget and public spending; Gary Gillespie, chief economist; and Andrew Scott, director of tax and revenues.
We have around 90 minutes for this session. Before I open the discussion, I wish Mr Swinney and his colleagues a happy new year, and I invite him to make an opening statement.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 10 January 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Colleagues might want to examine the net impact of that, but I will focus on what that tax will be used for. There are Barnett consequentials for health. In addition to those, how much additional resource is going into the national health service, for example?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 10 January 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Through fiscal drag, raising taxes impacts adversely on living standards, and it is anticipated that living standards across the UK will fall by 7.1 per cent over the next two years.
On St Andrew’s day, I was privileged to attend the official opening of the £88 million medicines manufacturing innovation centre in Inchinnan, which is a world-leading facility that has in part been made possible through Scottish Government investment. Given such examples, is it not time to focus more of the Scottish Government’s limited financial resources on boosting tech scalers—I know that there is an element of that in the budget, which I asked about after your budget statement, as you know—start-ups, research and development, innovation, skills and infrastructure in order to create high-value jobs, drive up private sector confidence in investment, attract people of working age—not just retirees—from across the UK and beyond to Scotland, and deliver the tax revenue that is needed to pay for the public services that we require?
