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.
Criathragan Hide all filters
Displaying 1570 contributions
|
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023-24”
Meeting date: 26 March 2025
Jamie Greene
Data is key.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023-24”
Meeting date: 26 March 2025
Jamie Greene
That is a very long answer that has not answered my question. You are using completely different language from that in the Audit Scotland report, but I can only use the language that the Auditor General has used. I appreciate that you are explaining the question.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023-24”
Meeting date: 26 March 2025
Jamie Greene
That is really helpful.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023-24”
Meeting date: 26 March 2025
Jamie Greene
I will interrupt you in the interests of time—it has been a long session already. My questions are about economic performance differentials in Scotland. I am hearing that the economy in London is different from that in Edinburgh. We understand and accept that. We understand that the block grant adjustments alter the amount of money that the Scottish Government gets and that different regions of the UK will have different economic activities. However, I am trying to understand the bigger picture.
Are there issues? Is there, as the Audit Scotland report highlighted, an underwhelming economic performance in Scotland relative to that in the rest of the UK, and does that affect how much money the Scottish Government has to spend? That is the underlying point that I made in the original question. It is not a trick question; I am just using the data that is in front of me.
Let us look at this financial year. The SFC has done some work on the 2025-26 forecast. It estimates that £1.676 billion in additional revenue will be generated through tax divergence in Scotland. That is great and I am sure that the Government will say that it is bringing in extra money. However, the SFC forecasts that it will result in only a net £837 million in cash to the Scottish Government, so that is about half.
Scottish taxpayers are paying more in tax but that is not generating the same amounts of money for the Government to spend on public services as we all want it to do. Is that because of relative economic performance differences between Scotland and the rest of the UK?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023-24”
Meeting date: 26 March 2025
Jamie Greene
Is it not a source of concern to you that 80 per cent of the potential tax take that could be achieved by having a different tax policy in Scotland is being lost to behavioural changes? You mentioned some of them—tax planning and early retirement—
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023-24”
Meeting date: 26 March 2025
Jamie Greene
That is good. You mentioned the Fraser of Allander Institute, which does some good independent analysis. I got the impression that the research that you have done on tax divergence seemed to demonstrate that it is having no, or very little, effect on behaviours. Is that the Government’s position?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023-24”
Meeting date: 26 March 2025
Jamie Greene
Good morning. I will start by looking at an area of the report that we have not covered, which is Scotland’s overall economic performance relative to that in the rest of the United Kingdom. For your information, that sits on pages 19 to 23 of the AGS report.
I will start with a question for the Scottish Government. Perhaps you can talk me through exhibit 3, which is the table on page 20. According to the Auditor General, between 2017 and 2023, the cumulative additional tax paid by Scottish taxpayers due to tax policy differences was £3.36 billion. The net increase to the Scottish budget is displayed not far away from that figure, and it is only £629 million. Why is that the case?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023-24”
Meeting date: 26 March 2025
Jamie Greene
What do you mean by “behaviours”? I am just getting my head around that. It is not a trick question, by the way; I am just trying to understand the table.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023-24”
Meeting date: 26 March 2025
Jamie Greene
That is interesting. Does that not demonstrate, though, that the potential tax income that could have been achieved through divergence is £3.367 billion? That is what the table is sort of saying; it is not saying what was actually paid but what the maximum potential was. The bottom line is that we actually get £0.6 billion in extra revenue from the divergence, which is only 20 per cent of the overall £3.3 billion. I am trying to get my head around where the 80 per cent loss is happening.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023-24”
Meeting date: 26 March 2025
Jamie Greene
Just to be clear, I am not talking about a race to the bottom. I do not want other parts of the UK to perform poorly relative to Scotland just so that we can say we are doing better. I am sure that we all want it to be true that every extra penny that is spent on additional taxes in Scotland creates more opportunity for the Scottish Government to spend money on public services. Surely that has to be a shared ambition.
What we are trying to unearth through these sessions is what is causing that difference. What percentage of every pound of additional tax that is spent achieves a net benefit to the Government? We are trying to unearth some of that.
For example, if we compare Scottish gross domestic product per capita to that in the rest of the UK, we can see that it was consistently lower for a long period of time. Levels of economic inactivity in the working-age population have been higher in Scotland than in other parts of the UK, and the SFC’s analysis from last year shows that Scotland’s working-age population is growing more slowly than that in the rest of the UK. There are therefore a number of factors. You have picked out a couple in which there have been some improvements and I am happy to hear that, but there are other areas in which there are major factors that mean that we are not achieving the sort of economic performance that we need to make sure that all that tax money comes back to the Scottish Government.
