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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
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.
Displaying 3259 contributions
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 28 May 2024
Kenneth Gibson
When Jackson Carlaw was talking about summits and tsars, he did not talk about the need for some MSPs to feel that they have a legacy. That used to be from members’ bills. I remember that, in the last few weeks of the previous parliamentary session, a number of colleagues brought forward a member’s bill, and I was the one who volunteered on behalf of my party to say to some esteemed colleagues who were retiring, “I do not actually think that your bill is that great and it should not progress.” I hope that someone else will take on that role in this session.
I am making a serious point. In a private session, we heard from a couple of former commissioners who had proposed, for example, a victims and witnesses commissioner and an older people’s commissioner, and who are now of the view that those should not progress, having looked at the matter from the outside. Are we at the cusp now where, as a Parliament, we should be deciding that, for example, on advocacy, we should perhaps pull up the drawbridge and say, “No, that really is an issue that should be addressed by ministers, the Parliament and individual MSPs,” rather than expect someone else to fill the gap that you talked about, which is almost a cop-out from what we as MSPs are supposed to be doing?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 21 May 2024
Kenneth Gibson
Is it not already welcoming and inclusive?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 21 May 2024
Kenneth Gibson
Is that diversity based on ethnicity, gender, social class or a combination of all those?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 21 May 2024
Kenneth Gibson
There are a lot of areas that I have not been able to touch on, because of time and colleagues needing to come in. My final question is: how has transparency improved over the past year?
10:15Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 21 May 2024
Kenneth Gibson
Colleagues will lynch me if I continually ask you questions. I will just ask two more. It is the answers; the answers are very detailed.
It would be remiss of me if I did not touch on the consolidated accounts, so I will ask a question about that. The resource budget for 2022-23 was underspent by 0.4 per cent. That is not even a day and a half of the Parliament’s resources. I really think that bringing that down to such a fine margin is a remarkable achievement. We have been told that, with all the background chaos and issues in relation to Westminster and all the rest of it, achieving such accuracy is like trying to land a jumbo on a sixpence, so that is an incredible achievement.
However, I have to say that the contrast between that and the capital budget is quite extraordinary. In that budget, there was a 13.5 per cent underspend at a time when we are currently short of capital. I have obviously read the reasoning for that, but the underspend seems to have been across all portfolios. It is significant, and I would have thought that, when it looked like there would such a huge capital underspend, there would be—this is what we used to call it 10 or 15 years ago—shovel-ready projects in order to ensure that that money was spent effectively. We all drive on roads full of potholes, for example. There must be some way in which we can redirect some of that capital. Will you explain why we have that huge 13.5 per cent underspend? The contrast with resource is quite astonishing.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 21 May 2024
Kenneth Gibson
What you are saying is interesting. Last week, in private session, we spoke to two former MSPs who had previously put forward commissioner proposals, which are still live but with others pursuing them—one is being pursued by the Government, and the other by a back bencher. Neither of those MSPs now support the establishment of the commissioners that they advocated for some years ago. One of them said that that was because of a lack of evaluation or evidence of the positive impact that commissioners have made. That might be unfair on certain commissioners, and we have heard commissioners and others argue quite passionately the opposite. I would like to know our witnesses’ views on that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 21 May 2024
Kenneth Gibson
A few are being taken back, actually, but never mind.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 21 May 2024
Kenneth Gibson
That applies not just to the commissioner but to the MSP who puts forward the proposal, of course.
That has concluded questions from the committee. Before we wind up, do any of the witnesses want to make any final points on any issues that they feel we have not covered?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 21 May 2024
Kenneth Gibson
Right. In a presentation that we were given, there was a list of 19. That might have been going back to the 19th century.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 21 May 2024
Kenneth Gibson
Okay. I thank our witnesses not only for their patience in waiting so long to speak but for the excellent level of evidence that they have presented in response to our questions.
Before we go into private session, I note that, next week, we will take evidence from the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body.
13:07 Meeting continued in private until 13:22.