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 4037 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Kenneth Gibson
For clarity, are you saying that, by 2028-29, it will be £7 million a year, or are you saying that it will be £7 million up to and including 2028-29?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Kenneth Gibson
I will move on to the Scottish Property Federation, which said:
“Tax legislation will rarely cover each and every eventuality and given the potentially high taxation burden of ADS we continue to feel that a power to enable a relief for exceptional circumstances, to be applied on the discretion of Revenue Scotland, could bring additional fairness to the ADS system.”
The Scottish Property Federation went on to say:
“there is something of a missed opportunity to address these wider concerns which we raise.”
What are your comments on that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Financial Memorandum
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Kenneth Gibson
RSPB Scotland has around 80,000 hectares of land, much of which has agriculture activities on it. It has said that, historically, the CAP performed poorly
“in terms of directing spend appropriately and offering best value for public money”.
It has said that, if we take the bill forward, we should look at cost benefits, that there have not been any alternative approaches, and that it has
“seen nothing from Scottish Government that suggests such cost-benefit analysis of a range of reform options has ever been undertaken.”
As I have mentioned a couple of times, it looks like a steady-as-she-goes financial memorandum, rather than an opportunity to make significant changes and to look at where we get the best value for money. What work is being undertaken to ensure that we get the best bang for our agricultural buck, given the commitments that we need to fulfil in the years ahead, not least with regard to the climate?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Financial Memorandum
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Kenneth Gibson
I appreciate that, but this seems to be a case of “steady as she goes”. Is there no thought about how those administration costs could be reduced so that more money could be invested directly in agriculture itself or in innovation for climate change reduction? It seems to me that there is an excellent opportunity to make changes to reduce bureaucracy and to improve efficiency and delivery. I am a bit disappointed that we are just keeping the money the same and that there seems to be no ambition to reduce that by even 5, 10, 15 or 20 per cent. The overall budget for the next financial year has a 4.5 per cent reduction, but there seems to be no consideration here of a reduction in admin costs.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Financial Memorandum
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Kenneth Gibson
The next agenda item is to take evidence from the Scottish Government bill team on the financial memorandum to the Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill. We are joined by Scottish Government officials John Kerr, deputy director of agriculture, rural policy division; Mandy Callaghan, deputy director, agriculture and land transition; Karen Morley, head of finance, agriculture and rural economy directorate; and Ewen Scott, branch head, Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill.
I welcome you all to the meeting. We finished our previous item a lot sooner than we had anticipated, so I apologise for rushing you in a wee bit earlier than scheduled. I invite John Kerr to make a brief opening statement.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Financial Memorandum
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Kenneth Gibson
If so much is unclear and is still being worked on, how did you come to the figure of £61 million?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Financial Memorandum
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Kenneth Gibson
When will we have that? It feels like groundhog day for the committee. We keep getting financial memorandums and framework bills—I apologise for the generalised moan, and I know that this is the only one that is your responsibility—and we keep having to ask questions about future resources, how things will be funded and what the secondary legislation will look like. When will we reach a position where administrative issues are no longer, to quote your own financial memorandum, “unclear”?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Kenneth Gibson
Over what period? Is that £7 million extra revenue for the Scottish Government or less revenue for the Scottish Government?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Financial Memorandum
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Kenneth Gibson
The financial memorandum makes clear that the money that will be available for financial support to the sector will be set in tablets of stone, so we are looking at exactly the same funding level from 2023-24 to 2027-28—£741.9 million. It is clear that the financial memorandum is already out of date, because the actual funding in the current financial year, according to page 94 of the Scottish budget 2024-25, is £738.9 million. That drops to £705.7 million, which is a 4.5 per cent decrease. Does that not knock a wee bit of a hole in the financial memorandum?
On page 96 of the Scottish budget, if we look at money for woodland grants, which has been raised in the chamber on several occasions, we see that you are again looking to hold the amount of money that is being invested in that area at £77.2 million, which is the current figure for this year. However, in next year’s budget, we are looking at a decline to £45.4 million, which is quite considerable.
How can we have faith in the figures for a period of five years when there are significant changes to the sums in the financial memorandum in the budget that we are about to vote on this month?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill: Financial Memorandum
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Kenneth Gibson
In paragraph 15 of the memorandum, you said:
“This mechanism will provide a platform to build momentum for private sector green finance investment by offering financial support explicitly linked to action for nature and action for climate on farms and crofts which should in turn give the land manager confidence to engage with private market investment in nature”.
However, a lot of the submissions are suggesting that the financial memorandum beds in vested interests and the status quo. The RSPB Scotland submission is the one that I have in front of me, but I have read four or five submissions that say almost the same thing. The RSPB Scotland submission says:
“the bottom 40% of recipients only receive 4.8% of the budget i.e., the larger businesses get most of the ‘income support’.”
It also states that less favoured area payments
“are not connected in any meaningful way to income and profitability”,
and that
“Farm Business Income data suggests, for example, that only 23% of LFA Cattle businesses have an income greater than zero without support payments”
whereas
“82% of general cropping farms, for example, make a profit without support.”
One could suggest that the bill basically continues with the status quo whereby LFA payments are made based on land rather than on what is happening on that land to achieve some of the objectives that the bill supposedly seeks to achieve.
