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: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Sorry—are those figures not after the autumn budget revisions have been applied?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
The overall amount of money that the Scottish Government has is up by £713.4 million. The update says that “deployment of available resources” to—not within—portfolios is £502.3 million. I take it that that is additional funding, so where does that additional money come from? We are talking about half a billion pounds. I should really have asked you that before I went into the specifics of the portfolios, so I apologise if that adds a bit of confusion to the discussion.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Thank you. I am glad that you have got another life, because I have been stuck with this one for decades.
I think that the number 1 question that members of the committee want to ask when they get these figures is why specific changes have been made. We get the changes, but we do not really get the reasoning behind them. I also think that it would make life a lot easier for you if that was laid out. As you say, it is very difficult for a minister—not that I have been a minister—who comes to a committee such as this one, because you never know what we are going to ask. There is a mountain of different figures and it is not always easy to keep them all in your head. I think that that would make life easier for all concerned.
I will ask a couple more questions to close this part of the meeting, because we have not really touched on capital much in relation to borrowing. Paragraph 132 of the update says:
“all Reserve availability is being utilised to support the 2022-23 financial position.”
Paragraph 139 says:
“It is ... now highly probable that the full Capital borrowing annual allowance will not be utilised in 2022-23 as discussed in paragraph 125.”
Having jumped from paragraph 132 to paragraph 139, we go back to paragraph 125, which says:
“late underspends will be used in the first instance to reduce the current £450 million borrowing assumption in line with the Scottish Government’s Capital Borrowing policy”.
Where are those late underspends envisaged? What kind of funding are we talking about? How much are we talking about in those late underspends?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
I recognise what you say about the fact that we might be talking about only 1 per cent of the overall size of the Scottish budget, but the changes within the actual portfolios are significant. For example, the funding changes to net zero have brought it down by £230.1 million, whereas we are talking about £1,110.4 million of additional funding for social justice, housing and local government. A huge proportion of funding is being moved within those portfolios. That is not 1 per cent—it is significantly higher than that. That alone is double the total figure.
If we look at it in a two-dimensional way—looking at the budget at the start of the financial year and at the end of the year—we can see that, yes, there might be a 1 per cent differential, but there are still those huge changes within the portfolios, which I find quite difficult to comprehend given that we had the autumn budget revision just a few months ago.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
That is helpful. You are therefore saying that, to an extent, the Scottish Government’s decisions on that are because of decisions made elsewhere and the way that you have to react to that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Apart from the colossal number of figures—there are literally hundreds of different figures here—we have the statement in paragraph 54 of the finance update—I mention this issue only because you touched on it a moment ago—that
“There has been a £565.1 million reduction as part of the budget revision with portfolios reviewing their non-cash requirements. The largest element relates to the £627.1 million movement in the Student Loan RAB charge. This is to cover the latest estimates from economists on the impact of the current macro-economic climate on impairment of the student loan book.”
What does that mean to most people? Not a lot. It would help if there was a wee bit more explanation as to what such things actually mean. Explanations of how those things impact on the Scottish Government seem to be in separate silos. What does that statement mean in terms of how much money we can spend on local government, the national health service, policing or whatever?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Okay. You said that that is worth £20 million to £30 million. Where would the other £20 million to £30 million be?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Okay. That concludes the first item on our agenda. We will now move on to our next item, which is formal consideration of motion S6M-07762. I invite the minister to move the motion.
Motion moved,
That the Finance and Public Administration Committee recommends that the Budget (Scotland) Act 2022 Amendment (No. 2) Regulations 2023 [draft] be approved.—[Tom Arthur]
Motion agreed to.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
We will now take evidence from the Minister for Public Finance, Planning and Community Wealth on a Scottish statutory instrument.
Mr Arthur is joined by Robert Souter, senior tax policy adviser at the Scottish Government. I welcome Mr Souter to the meeting, and I invite Mr Arthur to make a short opening statement.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 March 2023
Kenneth Gibson
Thank you. I do not have any questions, and I see that there are none from committee members. I am sure that you are relieved that there were no questions on that. I could have asked one or two for the sake of it, but why would one do that?
Thank you for your evidence, minister.
The next item on our agenda is formal consideration of motion S6M-08009. I invite the minister to move the motion.
Motion moved,
That the Finance and Public Administration Committee recommends that the Scottish Landfill Tax (Standard Rate and Lower Rate) Order 2023 (SSI 2023/50) be approved.—[Tom Arthur]
Motion agreed to.
