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 1200 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform Programme
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Liz Smith
That is very important. It would be double taxation, and you would be in very considerable danger of not only creating very considerable bills for some people who might not actually be at the top end of the scale but making things very complex administratively. As you know, the Parliament does not have the power to tax bodies on a non-income basis—that is, we cannot have a national wealth tax—but I think that the wealth tax that you have suggested in your paper is to be administered locally.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform Programme
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Liz Smith
Would that not make things more complex, too?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform Programme
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Liz Smith
I come back to the point that we want a much more sustainable future for the Scottish economy in terms of the revenue that we bring in, in line with necessary increased expenditure, particularly on things such as health and social care and social security. Obviously, that tax revenue is absolutely vital to the future. If we are going to have increased taxation on certain members of the population, as well as structural changes, we have to be clear that what we are suggesting will not provide the disincentives of the sort that the convener set out. It is not necessarily that people are going to move elsewhere, but that they might think, “Well, this isn’t very good for us—we don’t like this extra burden of taxation, so we won’t work quite as much,” which would be a considerable problem for the economy. Also, from a business angle, people think, “Do we want a higher tax burden in Scotland? Probably not.” Do you accept that that is a view that, certainly, business and industry hold?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform Programme
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Liz Smith
Thank you.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Liz Smith
I will pursue that point, in line with the committee’s job of scrutinising the budget. In your answers, you have given an idea of what the potential costs might be. Has the Government done some arithmetic on the benefits that would accrue, in particular from the creation of new jobs, in the five-year period that you spoke about earlier? The hope is that those would be highly paid jobs, so we would get a greater return through tax revenues from income tax and so on. Have you done any analysis of the benefits and the costs?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Liz Smith
So, are applications most likely to be successful if you see benefits to the Scottish economy overall, with regard to the revenue that they will bring in?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Liz Smith
Thank you.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform Programme
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Liz Smith
If that happened, would you also be in favour of the wealth tax that you have suggested in your paper?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform Programme
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Liz Smith
The other issue, which you come to later in your tax paper, is business tax. The key issue for the Scottish economy just now is getting the right balance between the tax take or revenue, which you have suggested can be increased in various ways—I might disagree with you on some of that—and behavioural change, a really quite significant example of which the convener has pointed out. It is all about trying to project what would happen in various scenarios and I am keen to know what the STUC would pick out as a priority basis in that respect.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Public Service Reform Programme
Meeting date: 12 September 2023
Liz Smith
I am just not entirely clear whether, by making recommendations on changes to tax, you want to change taxation rates or you want specific structural changes to the overall tax basis. That is a key question, and a question that the Scottish Fiscal Commission is asking, too.
