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 1055 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Liz Smith
We discussed this last week, too. Part of the issue is economic inactivity and the reasons behind that. Some of those reasons, including mental health issues, are justified post-Covid, but quite a large amount of inactivity is among people who could be at work but who, for one reason or another, have chosen not to work. We have heard of various places, Dundee being one, where they are quite keen to get people back into the labour market, for obvious reasons. Are we doing enough to promote policies that will do that and do we have enough information to show what is working?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Liz Smith
Do we know why the UK’s record on that is not as good as that of other countries? Do we have evidence of the reason for that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Liz Smith
Do you feel that having different types of tax, as opposed to the actual rates, is having an effect on consumer behaviour? Is it easy to find the evidence to suggest that consumer behaviour is being affected by the type of tax rather than by their having to pay more?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Liz Smith
Is it easy to tell which sectors of university research and which departments are particularly suffering because of that problem, or is it a general concern?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Liz Smith
That is a fair point.
I have one final question. You gave an interesting analysis of the problems within tax structures. To what extent are the UK and Scottish Governments—particularly the UK one—giving enough credence to debates about global taxation, particularly in areas such as environmental policy and tax avoidance? Do we have to be more cognisant of what is happening in such areas?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Liz Smith
Mr Lonsdale, I come to your submission. You have already spoken to the convener about different taxes that are coming in. You also say something really interesting:
“The devolution of these”—
meaning taxes—
“to local authorities appears to have been done in a piecemeal fashion”.
You strike up a contrast, saying:
“A kaleidoscope of differing local taxes may help plug gaps in councils’ finances. However, it can add complexity and cost to the operations of businesses and make budgeting trickier”.
This morning, we have been trying to find tax structures that are a bit more efficient. What would you like to happen to ensure that we do not have inconsistency and incoherence across the different types of tax, which is—in your view—knocking consumers?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Liz Smith
Mr Lonsdale, I come to your submission. You have already spoken to the convener about different taxes that are coming in. You also say something really interesting:
“The devolution of these”—
meaning taxes—
“to local authorities appears to have been done in a piecemeal fashion”.
You strike up a contrast, saying:
“A kaleidoscope of differing local taxes may help plug gaps in councils’ finances. However, it can add complexity and cost to the operations of businesses and make budgeting trickier”.
This morning, we have been trying to find tax structures that are a bit more efficient. What would you like to happen to ensure that we do not have inconsistency and incoherence across the different types of tax, which is—in your view—knocking consumers?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Liz Smith
I follow those developments regularly. I think that you are suggesting that, as things stand, the lack of coherence and there being too much inconsistency is creating a bit of a disincentive for consumers rather than adding the competitive edge that you would like to see, which would make businesses flourish. The Federation of Small Businesses is saying much the same.
Let me turn to Mr Lott. When the committee visited the University of Dundee, as you mentioned in your remarks, we heard a lot of really good things, and we were privileged to see some absolutely groundbreaking research. However, we also heard quite a lot about the difficulties that universities are having in attracting the people they need to attract. In part, that is because of visa issues, for which my party was partly responsible, but it is also because of the situation in some universities whereby it is much more difficult to bring your family.
Is Universities Scotland getting quite a lot of evidence on that? What do you suggest should happen to mitigate that? We desperately need those people in our world-class universities in order to improve the research side of things.
11:30Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Liz Smith
I will pursue issues about tax. I thank the witnesses for their responses to the convener, in which they have set out clearly and forcefully some of the problems and difficulties of the UK tax system and the Scottish tax system. From the available data, how easy is it to work out the efficiency of the revenue take in terms of behavioural change? Can we interpret what the behavioural changes are with the current tax system that we have?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Liz Smith
I follow those developments regularly. I think that you are suggesting that, as things stand, the lack of coherence and there being too much inconsistency is creating a bit of a disincentive for consumers rather than adding the competitive edge that you would like to see, which would make businesses flourish. The Federation of Small Businesses is saying much the same.
Let me turn to Mr Lott. When the committee visited the University of Dundee, as you mentioned in your remarks, we heard a lot of really good things, and we were privileged to see some absolutely groundbreaking research. However, we also heard quite a lot about the difficulties that universities are having in attracting the people they need to attract. In part, that is because of visa issues, for which my party was partly responsible, but it is also because of the situation in some universities whereby it is much more difficult to bring your family.
Is Universities Scotland getting quite a lot of evidence on that? What do you suggest should happen to mitigate that? We desperately need those people in our world-class universities in order to improve the research side of things.
11:30