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: 9 January 2025
Colin Beattie
Auditor General, WICS is a very small organisation—tiny, in fact—but for quite a number of years, it has adopted a culture in which the irregular is almost the norm. Buried within that is what I see as a level of extravagance not matched elsewhere in the Government sector. I know that action has been taken to put in place new limits on that, and new ways of controlling and managing expenditure through financial controls—all of those things—but underneath all that is still a culture that has been allowed to flourish, and which has been embedded for a great many years.
In reading your report, I detect—and this is my interpretation—an element of caution as to whether, in fact, that profound cultural change throughout the organisation as it is presently structured can actually be achieved. Am I reading too much into that?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 9 January 2025
Colin Beattie
Other than an audit qualification, what does the refusal to grant retrospective approval actually mean? What does it do? What is the impact?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 19 December 2024
Colin Beattie
I will carry on from where the convener left off. I am looking at the “Alcohol Framework 2018” and the obstacles that have been encountered in delivering the commitments in the framework. I would appreciate it if my question was addressed across the three principal areas that are laid out in the framework, which are to reduce consumption; to support positive attitudes and choices; and to support families and communities. What have the obstacles been? Have there been achievements that we do not know about?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 19 December 2024
Colin Beattie
You talked about the ageing nature of those who are dependent on drugs and how many have been in their situation for 10 to 20 years. Is there evidence that consumption of alcohol among younger people is dropping? Are crude consumption levels an adequate indicator of the harm that is being done? Is the situation similar, with a fall-off in consumption among younger people, but those who have been dependent on alcohol for many years still coming through the system and getting older? Does alcohol consumption track drug taking?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 19 December 2024
Colin Beattie
That takes us neatly to data collection, which is always a problem for the public sector. The Auditor General comments on the lack of good data. How can we target our resources against the problem if we do not have the data to inform us how to do that? How limited is the data? Is it capable of being used to properly inform local service planning? I am thinking of the rural areas that are described as being hard to get to. You have already highlighted changing patterns in drug use and the fact that there is not one particular drug of choice. How do you make effective use of the limited data that you have, and how accurate is that data in informing how you deliver services?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 19 December 2024
Colin Beattie
I am sorry to interrupt but, to be clear, do you disagree with the Auditor General’s statement that there is a lack of good data?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 19 December 2024
Colin Beattie
You indicated that comparisons with other countries are difficult, certainly from a data point of view, but there must be lessons that we can learn from other countries. They must have had successes that we could, to be frank, steal. We should not be too proud; if someone has found a way to do something better, we should latch on to that and see if it will work here. How good are we at learning those lessons?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 19 December 2024
Colin Beattie
Thank you for the background on the data. I will come back to what I asked about before. How good is that data for the purpose of informing local service planning? I am thinking in particular about the rural side, which is more difficult to reach .
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 19 December 2024
Colin Beattie
A lot of money is going into this, there is a huge focus on it and I think that everybody in Parliament has a high expectation that DAISy will produce results. My concern is about whether the data is incomplete or will not give enough of a steer at a local level with regard to patterns of drug use and therefore the provision of the service to meet actual local need, which must differ between urban and rural areas and between different parts of the country. Are we getting enough information to be sure that we are targeting the right places with the right resources?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 19 December 2024
Colin Beattie
My final question relates to early intervention, which, in almost anything, is a good thing. What progress has been made on early intervention and preventative measures by way of education in schools? How is the Scottish Government working with Education Scotland to take that forward?
09:45