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 3298 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
I have one final question in this area. Do you expect there to be a higher level of income tax per head in Scotland as a result of the process of fiscal drag, wages going up, inflation rising and so on?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
It would be helpful if you could notify the committee of when the minutes will be published on the website, so that we have warning of that.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
I admit that I do not have last May’s medium-term financial strategy in front of me or at my fingertips. When you describe the downturn in the oil and gas industry affecting income tax take receipts in the north-east, we can broadly understand that, but to what extent do you have data that absolutely backs that up?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
If the fee attached to the service level agreement or other parts of the memorandum of understanding were revised, that is something that you could do, if you had the resources.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
That would be helpful.
This morning’s session has been very useful for the committee. I thank Alyson Stafford, Lorraine King, Jonathan Athow and Phil Batchelor for giving evidence. We will consider whether we would like to take any further steps but, for the time being, I thank you for your evidence and draw the public part of the meeting to a close.
11:27 Meeting continued in private until 11:38.Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Thank you. I am now going to move things on and invite Willie Coffey to put some questions to you.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
So you have had talks about talks.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Another area that the committee has been particularly keen to explore is the implications of a much higher inflation economy, one of the consequences of which is that people’s real-terms living standards are, in most cases, being cut. On the other side of that equation, pay settlements have been higher and people’s earnings—not in real terms but in monetary terms—have been going up, which presumably has an implication for the income tax that is collected.
I turn to Jonathan Athow first. Could you help us to understand a bit more about the impact of inflation on the collection of Scottish income tax?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Thank you very much.
The committee is aware that, in places, the reports prepared by the National Audit Office and the Auditor General for Scotland used language such as “continuing limitations” and “risk”, and identified some areas of concern. We will get to those shortly but, before we get into some of that detail, I will take you back to one of the fundamental issues raised in the audit.
The issue came out in the evidence session that we had on 9 February with the National Audit Office and the Auditor General. They drew our attention to the conclusion that the growth in Scottish income tax receipts in the financial year 2021-22 was expected to be 11.3 per cent, whereas the UK equivalent income tax receipts were expected to grow by 13.2 per cent. I turn to Alyson Stafford first. Can you give us an explanation of the Government’s thinking on why Scottish income tax growth has been lower than the growth in the UK as a whole in recent years?
Public Audit Committee
Section 23 Report: “NHS in Scotland 2022”
Meeting date: 4 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Mr Burns, you are using the language of progress and improvement but, to give two examples from the Audit Scotland report, the percentage of A and E attendances seen within four hours dropped from 83 per cent in December 2019 to just 62 per cent in December 2022, and paragraph 37 of the report states that delayed discharges
“increased to the highest level since 2014/15”.
That does not sound like progress and improvement to me. It sounds as if we are going not forwards but backwards.
