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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Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2024-25”
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Richard Leonard
Our principal agenda item this morning is consideration of the National Audit Office’s report into the administration of Scottish income tax and of the Auditor General for Scotland’s letter of assurance that accompanies the report.
I am very pleased to welcome our witnesses. We are joined in the committee room by Stephen Boyle, the Auditor General for Scotland—good morning, Auditor General. Alongside Mr Boyle is Richard Robinson, who is a senior manager at Audit Scotland. I am very pleased to welcome from the National Audit Office—online, this year—Gareth Davies, who is the Comptroller and Auditor General at the NAO. Good morning, Mr Davies. Alongside Gareth Davies is Peter Morland, who is the director of financial audit at the NAO.
We are quite limited for time, because Mr Davies and Mr Morland have to leave for a prior engagement at around 10.15. We will all need to be disciplined in our questions and answers. Before we get to those questions, I invite the Auditor General to make a short opening statement, after which I will invite Mr Davies to do the same.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2024-25”
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Richard Leonard
Thank you very much. Joe FitzPatrick has some questions.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2024-25”
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Richard Leonard
Gareth Davies and Peter Morland, if you need to go off to your next meeting, we understand. I do not think that we as a committee have any further questions for you, so you are free to go.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2024-25”
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Richard Leonard
We were short of time earlier, but do any members of the committee have further questions that they want to put now? Colin Beattie is indicating that he does. With a degree of brevity, Colin, over to you.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2024-25”
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Richard Leonard
We can follow up on any outstanding questions in correspondence with the NAO.
My final question goes to the point about the cost of administering the Scottish income tax and the service-level agreement that exists. I think that there are committees in place that monitor that and look at the quality of data. When we consider these reports each year, it always strikes me that the administration cost is quite low—I think that it is £1.2 million. I always start to wonder whether, if a higher administration fee were paid, we could get more Scottish-level data out of the process. I do not know whether you have any observations on that, Auditor General.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2024-25”
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Richard Leonard
Thank you, Auditor General. I invite the Comptroller and Auditor General, Gareth Davies, to make an opening statement.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2024-25”
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Richard Leonard
Thank you very much indeed, Comptroller and Auditor General. We will touch on all of those areas in the course of this morning.
I will begin with the Auditor General. You mentioned your report from November last year, “Financial sustainability and taxes”, which looked in some depth at the dynamics of Scottish income tax setting and the benefits that it brings. You said that, in the 2025-26 tax year, although £1.7 billion will be raised from the Scottish income tax through the policy choices made by the Scottish Government, the impact on the budget will be a net rise of just £616 million, due to what you describe as the “tax base performance gap”. Could you elaborate a bit on that? Why does that gap exist? Is it to do with earnings levels and employment levels? What lies behind that figure?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2024-25”
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Richard Leonard
Colin, I will bring you back in later if we have time. I am conscious that we are up against the clock. The deputy convener has one question that he wants to put to the NAO.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2024-25”
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Richard Leonard
In the interest of time, I will ask one final question before I move on. It is about transparency. You mentioned in your previous answer that the Scottish Government could be more transparent about the gap between the money that it raises and how that ricochets through the block grant adjustment as a result of the Scottish fiscal framework. Could you say a bit more about what you expect the Scottish Government to do in order to fulfil your demand for more transparency?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2024-25”
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Richard Leonard
Before I bring in the deputy convener, I want to go back to the point about the financial and insurance sector. I would have expected that, out of all the parts of the economy, employers in the financial services sector would be on top of tax codes and tax arrangements. Earlier, Mr Davies spoke about deliberate or accidental mistakes. Would it be reasonable to infer that deliberate mistakes are being made by the financial services sector?
