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 1578 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of NHS Forth Valley”
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Jamie Greene
Can I move on to the present day? We could spend a lot of time on retrospect, but I am sure that lessons will be learned and that there is a lot of personal regret in the executive leadership team.
Ms Croft, where are you currently with some of the service improvements? It is still looking quite grim for patients in Forth Valley with regard to waiting times across a number of key metrics. At the risk of my questions needing a lengthy answer that we do not have time for, what are some of the steps that you are taking right now to improve, for example, performance with regard to the four-hour A and E turnaround and 18-week referrals for mental health assessments? What are the limiting factors? We have talked about workforce and finances, but what key barriers exist right now to making immediate improvements so that you can de-escalate out of level 4?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of NHS Forth Valley”
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Jamie Greene
It is at 64 per cent, against a target of 80 per cent, so it is still—
Public Audit Committee
“Decarbonising heat in homes”
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Jamie Greene
A lot of very good ground has already been covered, and I have been listening intently. I want to mop up a few other areas where you might share your wisdom.
First, there is an overarching discussion about how we define fuel poverty in the modern world. The technical definition is that a household is in fuel poverty if it spends more than 10 per cent of its net household income on fuel/energy consumption. As we know, if that figure reaches 20 per cent, a household is defined as being in extreme fuel poverty. It does not take very much to fall into that category. Even someone on a fairly substantial income who might be in a higher tax bracket could quickly find themselves in a position in which their annual fuel bill was £2,500 or £3,000, which would very easily take them into that situation. Are you worried that there is an assumption that people on very low incomes or people on various benefits are the sole victims of the current fuel poverty situation?
Public Audit Committee
“Decarbonising heat in homes”
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Jamie Greene
Thank you. I appreciate that we are out of time, convener, so I will park my other questions.
Public Audit Committee
Interests
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Jamie Greene
Thank you, convener, and good morning, colleagues. I have no relevant interests to declare.
Public Audit Committee
Deputy Convener
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Jamie Greene
Thank you. I, too, look forward to it.
Public Audit Committee
Administration of Scottish Income Tax 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Jamie Greene
I will perhaps come on to that volatility. Your opening comments—repeated in the opening paragraphs of your report—gave quite a broad-brush overview in using phrases such as “continuing economic uncertainty”, “tax policy divergence”, “weaker economic performance”, and so on. Those are quite generic terms. What specific work has Audit Scotland done on the root causes of why that figure of £390 million was so vast?
Public Audit Committee
Administration of Scottish Income Tax 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Jamie Greene
I have been thrown in at the deep end. Thank you, convener, and good morning to our panel.
Before I move on to my line of questioning, I might just conclude the previous one. We have had a bit of discussion about the variance in outturns versus forecasts. That flags a concern to me with the 2022-23 estimation from HMRC of £14.9 billion and what variance we might see in that outturn. Surely there can only be one data set at the core of all this. No matter who you speak to—the Fiscal Commission, analysts, policy makers or HMRC—I presume that they are not using different data sources, so a robust set of data that can help to produce the forecasts must sit at their core. Given the huge variance in outturns this year, can we be confident that the data set and the analysis of it are sufficiently robust for policy makers and analysts to produce the forecasts that affect decisions about tax rates, for example?
Public Audit Committee
Administration of Scottish Income Tax 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Jamie Greene
Specifically and in comparison, is it possible to quantify that underperformance in numerical terms?
Public Audit Committee
Administration of Scottish Income Tax 2022-23
Meeting date: 22 February 2024
Jamie Greene
I suspect that one of the biggest areas of interest, and perhaps concern, on the part not just of the committee but of the Government relates to the effect of tax divergence—Scotland having differential rates compared with the rest of the UK.
You state that, broadly, historically speaking, there has been little divergence, but that it has increased for this tax year and that it might increase in future tax years. The known unknown is what effect that will have on people’s behaviour and how it will affect the tax base and the resulting tax take.
What work has Audit Scotland or the NAO done on understanding how any such behavioural impact will affect the final outturn numbers? What are the risks? How high or low are they?
