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 1489 contributions
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 27 June 2023
Michelle Thomson
Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us.
I will come to Robert Emmott first, as he is the only person to have mentioned AI thus far. Such is the exponential growth in the use of AI that change in that respect is likely to be foisted on the councils and, indeed, the Scottish Government. Given that we know that, what active consideration have you given thus far to how AI can assist public sector reform and, indeed, the general provision of your services?
I appreciate that it will be a slightly different question for Malcolm Burr, so, as I have said, I will come to Robert Emmott first. After all, Dundee is home to Abertay University, which is a leading light in the field. Can you give us a flavour of that, Robert?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Michelle Thomson
Good morning. I want to explore three areas. The first is the equitability of the contribution of women, which is almost becoming a personal mission for me, having spent many years in various business roles and being up against all the barriers that we know about. As is my wont, I had a quick look at the bank’s distribution. I see that 42 per cent of board members, 33 per cent of executives and 28 per cent of investment leads are women. I do not know what the overall staff ratio is; perhaps you could enlighten me on that. What specific plans do you have to make things fair in that regard and to lead by example?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Michelle Thomson
Does that mean that you are as aware of these stats as I am and that you have internal targets to improve them so that you can see the positive outcomes of your encouragement?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Michelle Thomson
I am sorry to interrupt, but would it be possible for you to send us those statistics so that we can monitor the situation regularly?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Michelle Thomson
I will come on to that. I am sorry to interrupt, but I want to square off my first question about your specific plans to get to equitability. I absolutely understand that the whole infrastructure of the financial sector has traditionally been heavily weighted in a certain way, but I imagine that you have a leadership role that means that you can effect positive change, given your guiding mission. Do you have specific plans to get to equitability, and, if so, over what timeframe do you plan to get there? I am happy for you to write to the committee if you do not have all that information available just now.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Michelle Thomson
I look forward to hearing more about that. I am happy for you to write to the committee, given that Al Denholm is new to his post, but I gently give you notice that I will ask exactly the same questions this time next year.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Michelle Thomson
When you are in front of us next year, will you therefore be able to provide input data and say, “We were there; now we are here”, confident in the knowledge that I will ask about it?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Michelle Thomson
Excellent.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Michelle Thomson
Thank you very much.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Michelle Thomson
I will move on. I had a look at your interim equalities report, and I can see that there is still quite a gender gap in relation to the projects that are mentioned—the pay gap is 18.2 per cent compared with an average of 12.2 per cent. There is therefore still some way to go in relation to your projects. Only 13 per cent of board members across your portfolio of projects are women, which is well below the average. Are you applying any conditionality to projects in relation to equal representation? If not, why not? How will you break down those barriers in the wider environment?