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 1492 contributions
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Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
Good morning.
I will start by reflecting on the most recent correspondence that the committee has had, which is a letter from Ms Berge to the convener of the committee on 14 February. Thank you for your St Valentine’s day letter—it was the only one I got. I want to focus on the content of it and to give you an opportunity to clarify what happened.
My understanding is that when the committee looked at appendix 4 of the business case for the settlement agreement for departure of the former chief executive, the original draft was, of course, famously heavily redacted for us, but there was a signature on the document. The accountable officer stated that the business case was appropriate and that it complied with the Scottish public finance manual guidance. It was signed by Roy Brannen on 4 March 2024. Your letter seems to allude to that being an error. How so?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
What is your opinion as a director general? Is it good practice to allow somebody who is at the top of an organisation that has just been issued a section 22 report from Audit Scotland to be allowed to simply walk away from the process before a public audit hearing?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023/24”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
Can you talk me through exhibit 1, on the block grant adjustment, just so that we can get our head around this? A Barnett-determined block grant is allocated to the Scottish Government, but that is not what we actually get, due to adjustments based on devolved taxation. Can you, in very simplistic terms, talk me through how we get from the block grant allocation, through a net adjustment up or down, to what the Scottish Government actually gets?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023/24”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
Moving on to exhibit 3—this will all make sense in a moment—can you tell us about the relationship between any increase in taxation that is received through Scotland’s tax policy differences and what is described as the “net position”? Let me take the year 2021-22 as an example, as, according to the table, it was perhaps the starkest with regard to tax divergence. In that year, £749 million extra in taxation was raised, but the net position—however you describe it—was only £85 million, or 11 per cent of the tax raised, which is a tiny amount. Indeed, it is even starker than the figure of a fifth that the convener referred to. Again, can you talk me through the effect of that on the original Barnett-derived block grant versus what the Scottish Government gets? Is the Government getting the tax receipts, or is it getting this 11 per cent net figure?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
This question is aimed at whoever can best answer it. Did the former chair of WICS leave the organisation of his own accord or was he asked to leave and did he receive any financial settlement as a result of his departure?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
He resigned his position.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023/24”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
I do, convener.
Good morning, gentlemen and lady. I want to cover a few areas. First, I draw your attention to figure 7 on page 21 of the HMRC report, which is probably one of the more helpful tables in what is quite a lengthy and detailed report. It is certainly more visual, from my point of view; I was wanting to get my head around the analysis that has been done on the Scottish tax base in general, and this table paints a picture that we can look at.
Just to make sure I am being accurate, can you tell me whether the table is saying that higher and top-rate taxpayers in Scotland accounted for 13.3 per cent of taxpayers in 2018-19, and that in 2022-23, the latest year we have available, that figure had risen to 18.1 per cent of the tax base? That is the percentage of the tax base, but alongside that—and what is more important—is the percentage of tax that they are paying, which for the same group has risen from 58.6 per cent to 64.2 per cent. Is such a shift normal? If the percentage of taxpayers in any tax band increases, does the amount of tax that they pay also increase proportionately and at a similar or the same rate?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2023/24”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
Does that present any risk at all? For example, when we look at the top rate, we see that less than 1 per cent—0.8 per cent—of Scottish taxpayers paid 17.8 per cent of all tax. In other words, less than 1 per cent of taxpayers account for nearly a fifth of the Scottish tax base. Again, the relevance of this questioning will become clear in my later questions on tax behaviour. You have said that it is a UK-wide phenomenon, but irrespective of that, does that present any risk to any Government when it comes to trying to forecast how much revenue it will get in any given year from its tax income as opposed to from the block grant?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
However, the individual did not face it. That is the problem.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jamie Greene
Let us ask the new chair of the board. Mr Hinds, if you were sitting in the position that Mr MacRae was in at the time, would you have approved the resignation request or would you have preferred to go down a misconduct route?
