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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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Kenneth Gibson
I knew it—okay, right.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Kenneth Gibson
I get what you are saying, Professor Heald, but there is another difficulty in addition to the political difficulties of putting money away at a time when there is huge pressure on budgets, as there is at the moment. In previous decades, we saw a tendency in UK Governments to have, for example, what were, as I remember, called election bribes. Governments would have a couple of years of really difficult and unpalatable policies and then, suddenly, at the end of their four or five years, they would have a big pot of money. They would say that that was because their policies were working and they would blow the money on a pre-election splurge.
The difficulty is that that would perhaps be a temptation for a Government that was building up such a reserve. If it was 4 or 5 per cent behind in the polls, for example, it might feel a need to oil the wheels a bit and say that all the difficult policies that it had enacted over the past three or four years were working so fantastically well that it had managed to generate additional funding. Therefore, there are real difficulties with the approach that you suggest not just from a presentational point of view; the money would be a temptation to Governments.
When I was on Glasgow City Council, I looked at rent increases. Every year for 40 years, the lowest rates of increase were in election years and the highest rates were in the year after an election. I do not think that Glasgow was alone in that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Kenneth Gibson
Okay. We have to think about the areas from which we are going to take that money and that is the most difficult decision of all.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Kenneth Gibson
I am a great believer in evolution and flexibility myself.
That concludes questions from committee members; I have one question about taxation. What do you believe is the public appetite for new local taxes? The committee has discussed the point that people who earn ÂŁ43,000 to ÂŁ50,000 will face a marginal tax rate of 54.25 per cent from April, when we add national insurance to income tax. From the remaining sum, people have to pay VAT, excise duty, council tax, fuel duty et cetera, so there is a significant squeeze on incomes. Further down the scale, people are also feeling the pinch.
Is it not the case that the Treasury has a bit of a surge in income at the moment? We have fiscal drag, and inflation is bringing in additional revenue. I understand that Rishi Sunak has £18 billion more than he anticipated that he would have at this time of year. We could even remove the care levy that is being suggested—that would be fundable.
What I am trying to say is that, given the inflationary pressures and the extent to which people are feeling the pinch, particularly from energy, food and fuel prices, do you feel that this is the right time to consider additional taxation of any kind?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Kenneth Gibson
It is interesting from the committee’s point of view that ministers always say in every budget that every penny is committed, but when we end up with such bumps in the road—the UK Government reneging on £290 million is a significant bump—the money is still somehow able to be found to smooth them over.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Kenneth Gibson
Of course, inflation constricts things even more, because the lack of indexing means that what you can do with the reserve reduces every year.
I call Douglas Lumsden, to be followed by Daniel Johnson.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Kenneth Gibson
Basically, that is April 2023.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Kenneth Gibson
As John Mason will remember, we have had quite a number of debates on waste tourism in previous years. I cannot imagine that we will delve into that today, but who knows?
I appreciate why the Government has decided to keep the rates the same as those in the UK, but surely they should have gone up by at least the rate of inflation. That would not have had many people trucking over the border.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Kenneth Gibson
I will resist the temptation to try to provide an answer myself.
Professor Heald, you say in the same paragraph that the situation encourages
“games of credit claiming and blame shifting”
and
“makes it more difficult for the Scottish Government to set priorities”.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Resource Spending Review Framework
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Kenneth Gibson
Ms Congreve, you will have the final word. On the issue of fiscal drag, do you agree with what the UK and Scottish Governments have introduced for next year?
