Official Report: search what was said in Parliament

Chamber and committees

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.

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.

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Displaying 3231 contributions

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Public Audit Committee

“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”

Meeting date: 12 May 2022

Richard Leonard

Thank you for setting out that introductory framework. I am sure that you will have read the evidence that the committee took on 3 February. We were particularly exercised by the fact that we are in years 4 and 5 of a distinctive Scottish income tax system but there appear to be what, in our eyes, look like significant gaps in the data that is available and in the evidence that we think is necessary to allow Parliament and the Government to make informed decisions and choices about income tax policy in Scotland.

We are particularly interested in the level of compliance activity that is Scotland specific, in whether there is sufficient—or any—data on the tax gap in Scotland, and in the extent to which the information can be interrogated and analysed, which we think is extremely important in fashioning the evidence upon which we can build a sustainable and effective tax system.

You mentioned service level agreements, which we will return to. We are very pleased that the Scottish exchequer and HMRC are here as parties to that agreement, because we will want to explore that in our questions.

I call the deputy convener, Sharon Dowey, to open the questioning.

Public Audit Committee

“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”

Meeting date: 12 May 2022

Richard Leonard

I will pick up on that contemporaneous point before I come to my final question. Around the time of the UK spring budget statement, the Office for Budget Responsibility produced an assessment in which it suggested that there might be some buoyancy—a euphemism for an increase—in tax receipts, as a result of the rise in inflation. I presume that that assessment was based on wage and salary demands and rises perhaps going up at a higher rate than they have been for the past decade as a result of the fuelling impact of price inflation. My question is first to Jonathan Athow. Are you seeing any impacts from that rising inflation in your tax collection levels?

Public Audit Committee

“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”

Meeting date: 12 May 2022

Richard Leonard

My next question is for Alyson Stafford and Fiona Thom. Figure 9 in the NAO report shows where there is most divergence in tax paid by earnings. Those who are on around £50,000 in Scotland pay higher income tax than those in other parts of the UK. In light of that and of what Jonathan Athow has just said, is the Scottish exchequer monitoring the situation? Do you have any sense that tax receipts might be going up, and do you have any plans for how they might be spent if they go up?

Public Audit Committee

“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”

Meeting date: 12 May 2022

Richard Leonard

My final question is on a much more mundane and less exciting issue, but one that is very important to us: the service level agreement between the Scottish Government and HMRC. You will have seen that, in the evidence session on 3 February, we explored with Gareth Davies and Stephen Boyle how the agreement currently works and whether it could be improved. I suppose that my question is really about what consideration has been given to the existing terms of the service level agreement and whether it can be improved and cover things such as the tax gap in Scotland, for example.

Public Audit Committee

“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”

Meeting date: 12 May 2022

Richard Leonard

You can comment without prejudice, if you like, Jonathan.

Public Audit Committee

“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”

Meeting date: 12 May 2022

Richard Leonard

One of our questions and interests is whether it is the case that the data does not exist or is impenetrable, or whether we could get the wider data set that we think is necessary if the Scottish Government paid more than £700,000 a year for it.

Public Audit Committee

“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”

Meeting date: 12 May 2022

Richard Leonard

In our previous session on the issue, Colin Beattie went into some detail on one aspect of the report, and he is keen to get back into that level of detail on that aspect, so I invite him to put some questions.

Public Audit Committee

“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”

Meeting date: 12 May 2022

Richard Leonard

Could you tell us when you will officially respond to that Public Accounts Committee report?

Public Audit Committee

“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”

Meeting date: 12 May 2022

Richard Leonard

I am not trying to trip anybody up, but are you saying that you do not think that the Scottish Fiscal Commission uses that estimate, but you use it as a reference point?

Public Audit Committee

“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”

Meeting date: 12 May 2022

Richard Leonard

Okay. We might return to that before we finish.

My next question is for Jonathan Athow. The Audit Scotland report that accompanies the NAO report made a point about good governance and assurance arrangements and the need to keep those under continual review. It said that the process should include

“ongoing consideration of the frequency of third-party data checks and Service Level Agreement performance measures, such as setting compliance target levels for Scottish taxpayers without ‘S’ prefixes.”

Why has HMRC still not introduced a target in relation to the number of missing S prefixes? Will it do so at some point in the future?

Chamber and committees