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 3715 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Richard Leonard
My next question is for Alyson Stafford and Fiona Thom. Figure 9 in the NAO report shows where there is most divergence in tax paid by earnings. Those who are on around £50,000 in Scotland pay higher income tax than those in other parts of the UK. In light of that and of what Jonathan Athow has just said, is the Scottish exchequer monitoring the situation? Do you have any sense that tax receipts might be going up, and do you have any plans for how they might be spent if they go up?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Richard Leonard
My final question is on a much more mundane and less exciting issue, but one that is very important to us: the service level agreement between the Scottish Government and HMRC. You will have seen that, in the evidence session on 3 February, we explored with Gareth Davies and Stephen Boyle how the agreement currently works and whether it could be improved. I suppose that my question is really about what consideration has been given to the existing terms of the service level agreement and whether it can be improved and cover things such as the tax gap in Scotland, for example.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Richard Leonard
You can comment without prejudice, if you like, Jonathan.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Richard Leonard
One of our questions and interests is whether it is the case that the data does not exist or is impenetrable, or whether we could get the wider data set that we think is necessary if the Scottish Government paid more than £700,000 a year for it.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Richard Leonard
In our previous session on the issue, Colin Beattie went into some detail on one aspect of the report, and he is keen to get back into that level of detail on that aspect, so I invite him to put some questions.
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Richard Leonard
Could you tell us when you will officially respond to that Public Accounts Committee report?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Richard Leonard
I am not trying to trip anybody up, but are you saying that you do not think that the Scottish Fiscal Commission uses that estimate, but you use it as a reference point?
Public Audit Committee
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2020/21”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Richard Leonard
Okay. We might return to that before we finish.
My next question is for Jonathan Athow. The Audit Scotland report that accompanies the NAO report made a point about good governance and assurance arrangements and the need to keep those under continual review. It said that the process should include
“ongoing consideration of the frequency of third-party data checks and Service Level Agreement performance measures, such as setting compliance target levels for Scottish taxpayers without ‘S’ prefixes.”
Why has HMRC still not introduced a target in relation to the number of missing S prefixes? Will it do so at some point in the future?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of South Lanarkshire College”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Richard Leonard
I welcome Graham Simpson, who is an MSP for Central Scotland and who joins us for item 2, which is consideration of the 2020-21 audit of South Lanarkshire College.
I am pleased to welcome the Auditor General for Scotland, Stephen Boyle, to give evidence to the committee. We are also joined by Rebecca Seidel, who is a performance audit and best value manager at Audit Scotland, and by Lucy Nutley, who is a director at Mazars and who I think carried out the audit on the ground at the college.
I invite the Auditor General to give us a short opening statement.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of South Lanarkshire College”
Meeting date: 12 May 2022
Richard Leonard
We will need to consider what point is the right juncture to bring in the accountable officers, if that is the route that we decide to go down. I will bring in Willie Coffey at this point.
