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 MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs 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 5987 contributions
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Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ariane Burgess
As there are no comments, does the committee agree that we do not wish to make any recommendations in relation to the instruments?
Members indicated agreement.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Council Tax
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ariane Burgess
Before I bring in Fulton MacGregor with the next few questions, I note that Katie Hagmann just mentioned—and, throughout the meeting, we have talked about—modelling that will take place imminently. Would you be willing to share with the committee the modelling and the analysis of it?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Council Tax
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ariane Burgess
We heard in the previous evidence session that it might take three years from the beginning of the next parliamentary session to put something in place, so it sounds like a good idea to do some work up front to ensure that we can move forward at the beginning of session 7.
Have you, in your collaboration, kept in mind that an election is coming up, that manifestos are being written and so on? Are you considering that in your timeline? Katie, did you want to come in here?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Council Tax
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ariane Burgess
In response to my first question, Shona Robison said that the 2015 commission on local tax reform had some good recommendations but did not propose anything specific. How much you are going to look at those recommendations as part of the process, rather than reinventing the wheel?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Council Tax
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ariane Burgess
It is good to hear that you recognise that.
I will move on and bring in other members.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Council Tax
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ariane Burgess
On your comment about people’s reactions to tax, we are, in a way, in an unfortunate situation. In thinking about how we become a modern and progressive Scotland, we often look to the Nordic countries, but what they show is that taxation is really important for all the public services that make life good for everybody. Perhaps, as part of the process of considering the council tax, we have an opportunity to give people a better understanding of what it actually does.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Council Tax
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ariane Burgess
That is interesting. As you say, income tax comes out of people’s wages, so they must see it, but there is something about council tax that makes it very prominent. Having reflected on our previous evidence sessions, I wonder whether it is because council tax has a historical link to the poll tax, which was so controversial. Perhaps that is it. Shona Robison, do you have anything to add?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Council Tax
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ariane Burgess
I will pick up on the scope of the engagement. The idea of percentages came up at our meeting on 18 February. Would you consider talking to people about that? There are challenges with that idea and no one is necessarily advocating it, but what was said during that meeting suggests that a percentage system could be more proportionate and potentially fairer than the current banding system.
Would you be prepared to open up the engagement process to include discussion of that idea, so that people can understand that banding is not the only option? It might be the one that we end up with, but there could be other options.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Council Tax
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ariane Burgess
That sounds like one of the good next steps.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Council Tax
Meeting date: 4 March 2025
Ariane Burgess
I want to pick up on the 20 per cent IFS figure—the people whom it identified as being potential losers. In part of your collaboration and work together, will you try to dig into that data, to get an understanding of what the percentage really is?
