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 成人快手 and committees will automatically update to show only the 成人快手 and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of 成人快手 and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of 成人快手 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 2601 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Economic and Fiscal Forecasts)
Meeting date: 31 August 2021
John Mason
How objective is the index? We do not all have faith in how newspapers operate.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Economic and Fiscal Forecasts)
Meeting date: 31 August 2021
John Mason
As inflation has been mentioned a few times already, I do not want to spend a lot of time on it. However, as I understand it, you follow the Bank of England instead of the OBR on this matter, mainly because its forecasts are more recent. If inflation is at 4 per cent just now, how confident are we that it will fall to 2.5 per cent? If pressures such as shortage of labour were to continue in the longer term, would inflation continue to be higher in the longer term, too? Being of a slightly older generation, I remember inflation at 15 per cent, so 4 per cent seems reasonably low to me, but compared with recent years it is relatively high. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Economic and Fiscal Forecasts)
Meeting date: 31 August 2021
John Mason
On the wider question of population, our birth rate in recent years has been low. On the whole, immigration has made up for that, but there has been a bit of a reduction in that, too. What are your assumptions on population? How big an impact will the issue have, and should we be worried about it? My simple thinking is that if the population grows, the economy will probably grow, too, but if the population falls, it becomes very difficult to make the economy grow. Moreover, if the population of the rest of the UK grows while ours does not, where do we go?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Economic and Fiscal Forecasts)
Meeting date: 31 August 2021
John Mason
What is the impact on people鈥檚 behaviour? If there is more uncertainty, do people save more?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Economic and Fiscal Forecasts)
Meeting date: 31 August 2021
John Mason
We will keep an eye on that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy
Meeting date: 31 August 2021
John Mason
I appreciate that. It is an important issue. I lived through a time of higher inflation some years ago, and it concerns me very much.
The SFC was also more positive about the long-term scarring effect of Covid. It had thought that the effect would be greater鈥攊t thought that the figure would be about 3 per cent of the economy, but it now says that it will be 2 per cent. Do you recognise and agree with those figures?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy
Meeting date: 31 August 2021
John Mason
The SFC also made the point about different sectors recovering in different ways.
The SFC was slightly more negative about non-domestic rates. Its forecasts are lower than they were in January, showing that revenue from non-domestic rates will be 拢27 million lower this year, and 拢34 million then 拢48 million lower going forward. Is that inevitable? Is that just a result of Covid?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy
Meeting date: 31 August 2021
John Mason
Finally, I want to touch on social security spending. The SFC has forecast that the adult disability payment, which is replacing PIP, is likely to cost some 拢500 million more. It is warning that, if we put more money into social security, it will need to be balanced out somewhere else in the budget? Is the SFC being overly pessimistic? Do you have the figures in your budgets?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy
Meeting date: 31 August 2021
John Mason
I am totally in favour of having a more generous social security system than that in the UK, but it will come at a cost. No matter whether we are independent, it will, to some extent, be demand led. Is it right to say, therefore, that it will be something that will always have to be managed?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Economic and Fiscal Forecasts)
Meeting date: 31 August 2021
John Mason
Presumably, the birth rate will not change very rapidly, but things could change on the immigration side. There is demand from industry for immigration to be allowed for specific sectors, although the UK Government has said that it will not do that. How important would that be? If immigration were suddenly to be allowed, would that make a big difference to the forecasts?
