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 1514 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 7 November 2024
Jamie Greene
Good morning. I have a broad range of areas to cover. I will start by taking us back to something that Carole Grant said about outstanding accounts from 2022-23 that are still to be produced, published and made available. In correspondence from the chief financial officer just last week, we received a summary of the final outturn for 2022-23. I want to have a quick look at that, because it is relevant to this year’s consolidated accounts. Does that financial outturn take into account best guesstimates for those departments that are yet to report? Is it your understanding that there may be another version of the final outturn—a final final outturn, if you like?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 7 November 2024
Jamie Greene
It would probably be helpful to do that. Before I start talking about this, I presume that it is all in the public domain. I am looking at page 13 of the correspondence from the chief financial officer, rather than at your report, but it is relevant. If you do not have that, we can look at it some other time.
I imagine that the same will be true when we have the conversation about 2023-24. What are you looking for when you see huge underspend figures in the final outturn?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 7 November 2024
Jamie Greene
That is diplomatic.
The point that I am making is that we hear evidence of projects being put on hold, reprofiled or moved into future years to make ends meet, as is required of Government, and we hear about moratoriums on new capital investment. It is right for the public to ask us why schools or ferries are not being built and why hospitals are not being replaced when we are producing bits of paper that show £0.5 billion of underspend in the final outturn. I appreciate that the answer probably lies in complex accounting, but that straightforward question is asked of Parliament, which is why I raise it.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 7 November 2024
Jamie Greene
While we are on the issue of commercial assets, I might well jump ahead to the issue of Ferguson Marine and the assets in that respect. Your report specifically picks out MV Glen Rosa and MV Glen Sannox. The estimate for completing the vessels still sits at around £300 million. I think that that is your understanding, too, but in your report you make some criticism of the due diligence process with regard to value for money. Can you talk us through your concerns?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 7 November 2024
Jamie Greene
That is really helpful. Perhaps those are questions for Government departments to answer in the future.
I will move the conversation on to strategic commercial assets, on which your report helpfully provides some analysis. The strategic commercial assets division is a fairly new venture, in governance terms. My understanding is that it employs around 40 staff and spends a considerable amount of money on external consultants. I use the word “considerable”, which is subjective. It spent £1.6 million last year. Is there any indication of the cost of that operation to the Government? In your opinion, does it represent good value? It is a fairly new set-up.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 7 November 2024
Jamie Greene
I guess that that is the question. We know the total value of money invested from the public purse and we know what it was thought might be recoverable, or what the value of the loan was, which is not necessarily the value of the business itself. That would be a whole other conversation. That value seems to have jumped up massively. Are you confident that there is sufficient rationale for what is almost a doubling of the recoverable value of the loans?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 7 November 2024
Jamie Greene
I look forward to that work, if it occurs.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 7 November 2024
Jamie Greene
It is interesting that you picked up on local government. That is the only line in the accounts that seems to suggest an overspend—of £5 million. Every other budget line that has been presented to us has a considerable underspend, totalling £509 million—half a billion pounds. Is that normal? I am new to the committee, but a £0.5 billion underspend, in the final outturn versus the budget, seems like an awful lot of money.
09:30Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 7 November 2024
Jamie Greene
Auditor General, you will be aware that the vessels were supposed to cost under £100 million—that is, for both. The latest figure, back in March, was £300 million. My suspicion is that it might have gone up since then, given the further problems that have been encountered at the yard. You do not state that that does not sound like value for money, but you allude to it. Is that your assessment?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”
Meeting date: 7 November 2024
Jamie Greene
From a public expenditure point of view, if that £100 million becomes £350 million or £400 million, is there not a risk that costs will endlessly spiral? Is there a mechanism for intervening and saying, “Look—you can’t just keep chucking money at something endlessly”? Those figures seem to show massive jumps, not little increments of overspend, so when you look at budget versus what is actually being spent—when things are going massively over budget, by hundreds of millions of pounds, in a very short space of time—what is the cut-off?
