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 2597 contributions
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Colin Beattie
In previous reports that have come to the committee, there has been no indication of any significant improvement in non-recurring expenses. What is happening now that is going to make a difference?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 29 January 2025
Colin Beattie
Eighteen months ago.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 22 January 2025
Colin Beattie
Permanent secretary, to start with an obvious aspect of the management of the finances, the consolidated accounts show a net expenditure in 2023-24 of £53.98 billion, which is £277 million less than was budgeted, and that is split between the resource budget at £193 million and the capital at £84 million.
What were the main reasons for the underspends?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 22 January 2025
Colin Beattie
I think that you are optimistic about the level of non-recurring expenditure in organisations such as the national health service. We have seen report after report from the Auditor General clearly stating that the majority of savings achieved by NHS boards come from non-recurring expenses. That is a huge thing to tackle and I am not hearing how it will happen. What is the initiative that will change that? What is going to transform those boards?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 22 January 2025
Colin Beattie
I am sorry to interrupt. You said that you keep £100 million, so is that across capital and resource?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 22 January 2025
Colin Beattie
Do you have a comprehensive understanding of the level of non-recurring savings throughout the public sector?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 22 January 2025
Colin Beattie
But if the Government is going to work throughout the public service on reducing non-recurring savings—in other words, on making them recurring in some way, providing a more efficient way of delivering a particular service or however it is done—it will surely need a comprehensive understanding of scale throughout the public sector that needs to be tackled. You also need a task force that can do that and cash resources so that you can put the money up front to implement the innovations and so on that are needed.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 22 January 2025
Colin Beattie
There is clearly a lot of work to be done on that.
The consolidated financial information and the work that is being done to bring it together—although it has taken a long time to get to the point that we are at now—is improving. How is that consolidated information being used by the Scottish Government?
It is not the same information that we have had before. Every year, we get a bit more, and every year, there is a bit of progress. That is fine—it is maybe not as fast as we would like it to be, but it is there. How is the Government using that information? It is not just for benefit of this committee; it has a purpose.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 22 January 2025
Colin Beattie
Far from trying to balance the budget, it sounds as though you are actually trying to underspend the budget. Do you have a target for an underspend?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 22 January 2025
Colin Beattie
That is a good thing, but it still does not explain how you will dig out the non-recurring expenses and replace them with something sustainable.