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 893 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “How the Scottish Government is set to deliver climate change goals”
Meeting date: 18 May 2023
Craig Hoy
The term “just transition” is now commonly used, although I would venture to suggest that it is not commonly understood in all quarters. What checks are in place to ensure that net zero targets are met in a way that is fair to all, so that it truly is a just transition? For example, in the national economic interest and the national security interest, the UK spent £40 billion last year on oil and gas from Norway. Would it be right to have broader concerns that winding down Scotland’s oil and gas sector would have an impact in that the transition would not necessarily be fair for all?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Craig Hoy
I know that you have tax design in your job title; in terms of tax design, that is a pretty clear piece of the jigsaw that you would build into the tax system.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Craig Hoy
What are the emerging trends, and what is the emerging evidence telling you about behavioural patterns in Scotland? Is it too early to capture anything, or can we see that, for example, people are not taking promotions or doing the extra shift because the rate of tax is discouraging them?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Craig Hoy
I put those scenarios to you because behavioural and working patterns have changed dramatically since Covid. People no longer have to live near their work, and remote working is far more common than it was. To what extent are you or either Government looking at the impact of remote working in relation to the operation of the tax system?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Craig Hoy
Thank you for the clarification.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Craig Hoy
Is it fair to say that the greater the divergence, the greater the risk is that people’s behavioural patterns will start to change?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Craig Hoy
The discussion around the impact of the changes and whether it is sensible to have very divergent tax rates is, in effect, a matter for ministers. Alyson Stafford, do you want to comment on what work is being undertaken? We might find out about the problem only once it is too late—once too many upper rate taxpayers have moved or too many individuals are incorporated and, therefore, all the tax receipts are going to the UK Government rather than the Scottish Government. What work is being done to ensure that we are alert to the fact that we do not come to the issue once it is too late and has already had a material impact on tax receipts in Scotland?
10:30Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Craig Hoy
If you do not mind, I am going to crunch into reverse and go back to the issue of behavioural patterns, because there were some figures that I could not locate earlier, but I have found them now. A report that HMRC produced said that, for those in the upper-rate tax band—those who earn £150,000—a 1 per cent reduction in the percentage of income retained after tax leads to a reduction in income declared of between 0.52 and 0.77 per cent. The report made it quite clear that that was down not to non-compliance but to behavioural change. Does that not show that we already have empirical evidence that suggests that such tax increases will lead to behavioural change? Who should advise ministers about that—should it be HMRC, the Scottish Exchequer or the Scottish Fiscal Commission? Those figures seem pretty clear to me.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Craig Hoy
Is there a risk that there is a lag, and that public policy is continuing to move in a more progressive direction, towards higher tax, when the impact of that will not be felt until two or three years after any fiscal change takes place?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Craig Hoy
If I was the chief executive of a Scottish bank but lived in London, commuted up from London and stayed in a hotel five days a week, even though I was spending more time in Scotland than in England, I would still be resident in England. Is that correct?
