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 1604 contributions
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 2 November 2022
Jamie Greene
That all sounds quite concerning. It sounds as though you are saying that a flat cash settlement would lead to Covid-like conditions within the prison estate in relation to the services that could be offered. Of specific concern would be the loss of rehabilitation services, purposeful activity and interaction with other services to deal with mental health and addiction problems, for example. Would all of that activity be scaled back to allow you to simply maintain basic safety within the prison estate?
11:15Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 2 November 2022
Jamie Greene
I will let others come in. I may come back to the issue of pay later, though, if that is okay.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 2 November 2022
Jamie Greene
This is probably something that we should have asked Teresa Medhurst about while she was here, as there is a budget element to it.
Although Teresa Medhurst has answered our question in her written response, we were not just looking for the numbers. One of the things that came up in our discussion on the topic was about the ability to compare costs across the different estates. I have no idea whether £5 million is good value or poor value for money. Given what those premises are doing—we have seen them—I am sure that that is all very worthwhile. However, we know that they can facilitate quite a substantially lower number of people. Are the £5 million costs for housing 10, 30 or 100 women? How does that compare with the estate historically or to other types of custody units?
It would have been helpful to get more detail around that to make that comparative analysis. That was the reason for the question; we did not just want to know about the numbers.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 2 November 2022
Jamie Greene
Good morning, gentlemen. I want to follow on from what you have just said and ask about the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service.
In your submission, you go into some detail on your scenario planning for a flat cash settlement. Can you elaborate on some of those potential scenarios, particularly with regard to the 25 per cent reduction in sheriff court sittings, which sounds like quite a lot; the 10 per cent reduction in tribunals; and the potential closure of three or four court buildings? I am concerned about the effect of those reductions on what we already know is an immense backlog. What would the implications be in that respect?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 2 November 2022
Jamie Greene
That is according to the current funding scenario, but with a flat cash settlement, would we be talking about 2026, 2027 or even 2028?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 2 November 2022
Jamie Greene
That does not sound very positive.
I want to ask you about one other issue—maintenance, for which you use your capital budget. We have talked a lot about the large chunk of people’s budgets that goes on resource and pay and, indeed, future pay increases, which is a whole other ball game that we have not discussed yet, and the complications of the effect of that on your budgets, but capital budgets are also important. For example, you say that if you receive no increase in your core capital funding, that would run the risk of safety-related incidents and also make it virtually impossible for you to meet your carbon reduction ambitions. Will you elaborate on that?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 26 October 2022
Jamie Greene
On the modelling of a potential 5 per cent annual pay rise for the next couple of years—it sounds as though that has been rejected at this stage, so it could be more—and with a flat cash settlement, you would be looking at a reduction of more than 780 full-time equivalent firefighters and around 30 full-time appliances out of 120. That is quite a big reduction. What are the consequences of that?
11:45Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 26 October 2022
Jamie Greene
I presume that the 17 per cent would be what we would classify as front-line officers—people who are out in the communities and on the streets responding to events and interacting with the community.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 26 October 2022
Jamie Greene
Thank you.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 26 October 2022
Jamie Greene
In that case, if a 5 per cent pay offer were rejected and you had to pay more to keep officers—or, at least, to stop industrial action, strikes or whatever method would be available to them—what would happen to that 4,400 figure? Would we be talking about 5,000, 6,000 or 7,000? Would it double? Would a 10 per cent offer mean a reduction of 8,000 or 9,000?