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 1067 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 November 2024
Ivan McKee
That has been managed.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 November 2024
Ivan McKee
On top of that, we would have had to budget numbers earlier on to balance that budget, which was what we needed to do. That would have necessitated making more significant cuts in public services at the start of the year, in order to plan for what only became apparent through the year—which we did not know at the time would become apparent—which was the level of the public sector pay deals.
The reality is that we have not had to cut to the extent that we would have had to do in order to fund those; the cuts would have been much more significant in that sense. We have managed to fulfil those public sector pay deals, and we have done it without strikes in the health service, which has been the consequence of what happened down south.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 November 2024
Ivan McKee
We said that it was broadly in line with what we expected.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 November 2024
Ivan McKee
There is a slice of that. Again, not all the numbers are nailed down, but around £600 million will be for public sector pay. As I said, there is still uncertainty about the funding for the national insurance contributions, which we estimate will be around £500 million. We expect that there will be funding for that, but we are not clear how much it will be, when it will be and what it will cover.
You mention pensions contributions. The change in that was north of £300 million, and we can get the details on that. As I said, there are health consequentials coming through as part of that amount that we are committed to spend on health. It is clear that there are cost pressures there, with health inflation typically running higher than inflation across the rest of the economy. We can give you a more specific breakdown on that if you require it.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 November 2024
Ivan McKee
In what sense?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 November 2024
Ivan McKee
That is absolutely not correct. Clearly, there are pressures that would build or become clearer over time, and that is the normal process. As I said at the start, because we do not have full borrowing powers, we are having to use our assumptions in order to manage within a very tight envelope.
The counterfactual is that we had assumed that public sector pay was going to be much higher. That would have meant that there would have had to be significant cuts earlier on. [Interruption.] Let me just follow through on this, because it is really important. There would have had to be significant cuts in the budget much earlier in that process. We would then have found ourselves, later in the day when the consequences had come through, in a position of being unable to spend that money in-year because of how late it was coming through. We would have had a cut in public services as a consequence of that, which was not necessary in the scenario that you are painting. I do not think that that would have been the right thing to do.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 November 2024
Ivan McKee
We can either hand it back this year, in which case Mr Marra would say, “Why have you not kept it for next year?”, or we can hand it back next year, in which case, Mr Marra would say, “Why did you not spend it this year?” We are still to announce the decision.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 November 2024
Ivan McKee
You can only use it once, right? You cannot lean on it again and again—
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 November 2024
Ivan McKee
We have used some of it in-year—
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 November 2024
Ivan McKee
Clearly, the pressure would be increased; that goes without saying. There are potentially other levers, but some of the decisions that we have had to make would have been harder. On the spend side, there would have been more pressure on the limited borrowing powers that we have, and we would have had to use those more extensively. There would have been things that, frankly, we might not have been able to do. However, as I said, it is important to recognise the context in which those decisions were taken, which was a lack of information as to the extent of the consequentials from the UK Government, although there was an understanding that there would be consequentials to some extent.
