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 3298 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow (Holdings) Limited”
Meeting date: 27 April 2023
Richard Leonard
For us, as the Public Audit Committee, the question is not just about the fact that those things happened but that they were allowed to happen. Where was the sponsorship team and where was the Government’s oversight? To me, that seems to be a fundamentally important question.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow (Holdings) Limited”
Meeting date: 27 April 2023
Richard Leonard
I invite Willie Coffey to put some questions to you.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow (Holdings) Limited”
Meeting date: 27 April 2023
Richard Leonard
For the avoidance of doubt, the enterprise must comply with the Scottish public finance manual guidance, so there should be openness and transparency, there should be value for money and there should be an internal audit function, for example. My reading of the external auditor’s report is that FMPG did not have an internal audit function at the time of reporting. Is that still the case?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow (Holdings) Limited”
Meeting date: 27 April 2023
Richard Leonard
Again, I note that the reported cost for the FMI report is £200,000, is it not? There is also some concern about that report being covered by a non-disclosure agreement.
My final question goes in a slightly different direction. In the report, you highlighted the question of the demographic of the workforce in the context of the broader point about skills, and whether we are planning sufficiently to invest in the skills that we will need in future. To what extent, in your opinion, is the Scottish Government addressing what you have identified as a skills shortage?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow (Holdings) Limited”
Meeting date: 27 April 2023
Richard Leonard
Thank you. I will turn to a couple of areas. In paragraph 11 of your report—which, I think, is an amplification of a letter that the chief executive officer of FMPG that was sent to the convener of the Scottish Parliament’s Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee—you highlight that the estimated costs for the Glen Sannox, or 801, are £101 million and that the estimated costs for 802 are £108.6 million. Why is 802 more expensive than 801?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow (Holdings) Limited”
Meeting date: 27 April 2023
Richard Leonard
That is fine. I suppose that the expectation would have been that the second vessel would benefit from lessons learned in the construction of the first vessel, which would lead to a reduction in the cost base.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow (Holdings) Limited”
Meeting date: 27 April 2023
Richard Leonard
So there is a possibility that there could have been a pre-emptive strike. The 2021-22 Scottish Government pay policy guidelines stipulated a minimum 2 per cent pay increase for public sector workers who were earning between £25,000 and £40,000, and it was 1 per cent for those who were earning between £40,000 and £80,000. The payment of a 17.5 per cent bonus was therefore, in anybody’s terms, a significant deviation from the Government’s pay policy.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow (Holdings) Limited”
Meeting date: 27 April 2023
Richard Leonard
I want to pick up on that point before I bring in Bill Kidd. To go back to the framework agreement, Joanne Brown, you said that it was 12 to 18 months in the making. On pay, the framework agreement talks about maintaining
“regular dialogue with the SG Finance Pay Policy on any proposals with an expectation that these will be broadly consistent with the provisions of SG Pay Policy and Staff Pay Remit. Any significant deviations will require further approval.”
Was that iteration in circulation at the point at which the turnaround director drafted a paper that was approved in February 2022, just a month before the framework agreement, including those clauses, was introduced? Was it a pre-emptive strike by the turnaround director?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow (Holdings) Limited”
Meeting date: 27 April 2023
Richard Leonard
You used—advisedly—the word “reviews”, plural. It is a little bit confusing, and perhaps in the realm of bewildering, that there could be more than one review with, presumably, broadly similar terms of reference. Aspects such as a business plan for the yard, what can be done to give it a sustainable future and what the market looks like are, presumably, part of the research that an organisation such as FMI would carry out. Why would there not be just one review to be signed off by both FMPG and the Scottish Government?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2021/22 audit of Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow (Holdings) Limited”
Meeting date: 27 April 2023
Richard Leonard
Auditor General, you spoke about ambiguity and the framework agreement not being as clear as it might have been. How should the sponsorship team’s relationship with an NDPB such as this be, when presumably not insubstantial amounts of public money—£10 to £15 million—need to be committed? Does it come as a letter of comfort at the end of the process or should there not be some kind of prior sign-off by the sponsorship team or the minister or whoever to allow the expenditure to be committed? We have heard that before in other circumstances around the contract.
