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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Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of NHS National Services Scotland”; and “Personal protective equipment”
Meeting date: 4 November 2021
Richard Leonard
For the next item, I welcome two new witnesses from Audit Scotland, who join the Auditor General. Joining us remotely is Ashleigh Madjitey. If you want to come in at any point you can put an R in the chat function. That would be helpful. My apologies—Carole Grant joins us remotely. She is an audit director in audit services at Audit Scotland. I welcome Carole, and I welcome Ashleigh, who is here with us in the room, to talk about the fuller 2020-21 audit and the subsequent, more recent, briefing on personal protective equipment. We have a series of questions to ask our witnesses. Auditor General, do you want to begin with an opening statement to get us under way?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of NHS National Services Scotland”; and “Personal protective equipment”
Meeting date: 4 November 2021
Richard Leonard
I want to go back to part of the discussion that you have just had with Colin Beattie. These are my calculations, so they may not be entirely reliable, but, broadly speaking, and based on the figures that are in the report, the increase in the volume of PPE from 2019-20 to 2020-21 was of the order of 212 per cent, but the cost of shipments increased by 2,100 per cent—by a factor of 10. The price inflation was exorbitant, was it not? Do you have any reflections on that?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of NHS National Services Scotland”; and “Personal protective equipment”
Meeting date: 4 November 2021
Richard Leonard
Who would normally issue that guidance? Would it be the Scottish Government or NSS?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of NHS National Services Scotland”; and “Personal protective equipment”
Meeting date: 4 November 2021
Richard Leonard
Thank you. I will bring in Willie Coffey.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of NHS National Services Scotland”; and “Personal protective equipment”
Meeting date: 4 November 2021
Richard Leonard
With that, I thank the Auditor General, Ashleigh Madjitey, who is with us in the committee room, and Carole Grant, who joined us remotely, for some robust and illuminating evidence. It is greatly appreciated.
11:16 Meeting continued in private until 11:37.Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Crofting Commission”
Meeting date: 4 November 2021
Richard Leonard
Thanks. Committee members have a whole suite of questions to ask.
On your previous answer about those who directly represent crofting communities being on the commission, Auditor General, do you—or perhaps Pat Kenny or Graeme Greenhill can answer this—have any sense of the extent to which the issues raised in the report have affected the key services that the commission provides to those communities?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Crofting Commission”
Meeting date: 4 November 2021
Richard Leonard
Did your team look at communications between the sponsor division and the commission, including the board, in order to understand what that relationship was like? Were you able to amass any evidence that pointed to relationships—or lack of relationships—that rang alarm bells?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Crofting Commission”
Meeting date: 4 November 2021
Richard Leonard
In the previous session, the Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee raised concerns about the adequacy of sponsorship arrangements between the Scottish Government and public bodies, especially non-departmental public bodies. I think that those arrangements are set out very clearly in the Scottish public finance manual. Accountable officers in organisations, as well as, I presume, board members in those organisations, should receive some training on, or be led to some understanding of, their roles and responsibilities and what sponsorship arrangements should look like. What is your sense of that? To what extent has that happened in the past and is it happening now?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Crofting Commission”
Meeting date: 4 November 2021
Richard Leonard
Mr Beattie has a series of questions that will probe governance and the different areas of responsibility.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2020/21 audit of the Crofting Commission”
Meeting date: 4 November 2021
Richard Leonard
We are drawing towards the end of the evidence session. I will bring in Sharon Dowey shortly.
Mr Kenny mentioned the hopefulness that comes with the commissioning of an external consultant’s report. However, did I not read that there was a consultant’s report in 2016 that looked into the Crofting Commission? The question that that provokes is to what extent there is a similarity between the findings of the consultants in their 2016 report and what Deloitte uncovered in 2020-21. Is the Crofting Commission just dealing with the same issues? Are you as auditors having to deal with the same issues? Are we as the Public Audit Committee of the Scottish Parliament having to deal with the same issues over and over again?
