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 1619 contributions
Meeting of the Commission
Meeting date: 23 June 2025
Jamie Greene
When this budget was approved, was that change not already known about? The budget would have been approved, based on that information at the time, yet there is still this huge variance.
Meeting of the Commission
Meeting date: 23 June 2025
Jamie Greene
There was a 20 per cent jump in what was budgeted versus what was spent on external organisations. That is not within the margin of small error; it is a huge variance.
One aspect missing from the table, on which perhaps other members will comment, concerns the IT issues that we have discussed previously. We have had long conversations about your big plans for upgrades and investments, but I struggled to find those reflected in the budget spend for last year. Is that because you have not spent the money, but the work is coming down the line and we will be hit with a big ask next year, or is that spend in there? I heard what you said about laptops and cybersecurity issues. By the way, I am all for spending money on cybersecurity—and I am sure that the laptops are lovely—but given what we talked about at previous meetings I was expecting to see lines on major software or infrastructure IT upgrades that would propel you into the future.
Meeting of the Commission
Meeting date: 23 June 2025
Jamie Greene
Where would I find information on internal Audit Scotland staff? What level of surveying has been done there? How useful or reliable is the data on their happiness or contentedness with what they are given to allow them to do their jobs?
Meeting of the Commission
Meeting date: 23 June 2025
Jamie Greene
There is a debate as to why not. It is a competitive working environment and other companies may offer different working practices that are more favourable to people, so you have to stay competitive, I guess.
I am happy to leave it there. I may have other questions on the audit quality later.
Meeting of the Commission
Meeting date: 23 June 2025
Jamie Greene
If I recall correctly, previous reports on the quality of public audit provided more information on audit inputs from your auditors, including internal auditors and external audit partners. Reports also included useful information from auditors who were surveyed for their opinions on, for example, whether they felt that they were able to carry out a high-quality audit, whether they had all the resources that were necessary to allow them to do their job and whether they were given the appropriate time, training and development to do so. It was quite helpful information, but it has not been included in this year’s report. Why not?
Meeting of the Commission
Meeting date: 23 June 2025
Jamie Greene
The added element of risk for you is that not only do you hold your own organisation’s data but you deal with large amounts of data from other public sector organisations. Presumably, some of that data is quite sensitive. Will you give us an idea of the scale of the issue? How frequently do such attacks happen?
11:00Meeting of the Commission
Meeting date: 23 June 2025
Jamie Greene
Thank you. I am sure plenty of people would argue about the security of having data in the cloud versus holding it on hard drives in your own office, but that may be a discussion for another day. Thank you, chair.
Meeting of the Commission
Meeting date: 23 June 2025
Jamie Greene
I can work only with what I have in front of me, and the summary does not go into much detail.
You are right that the approved budget in the “Other” line was £578,000, while the actual spend was £121,000. As you have said, that could be because you have, in year, been able to distribute some of that money elsewhere, but it is quite hard to follow that.
On the obverse, the approved depreciation budget was £430,000, but according to the table, the spend turned out to be nearly £1 million, or 126 per cent over. Again, is that just a case of money being shifted around?
Meeting of the Commission
Meeting date: 23 June 2025
Jamie Greene
Richard Leonard is welcome to come back in on that point if he wishes.
This is an interesting area. I was under the impression that you have fixed fee rates for external organisations that, if I recall correctly, are subject to reasonably lengthy contracts. The sheer level of the rise in external fees surprised me, though: it is nearly £1.7 million above what was budgeted. Are you saying that that rise has been driven not by understaffing issues in your organisation but by the clients that you manage?
Meeting of the Commission
Meeting date: 23 June 2025
Jamie Greene
As a side question to that, in our earlier session we talked particularly about some of the costs involved, but I know that it has been a bit of a tough slog for many public organisations to try to bring people back together and get people back into the office. Is there a direction of travel on that for your organisation? Has it stabilised? Are you still trying to encourage people, particularly your auditors, to work face to face more? Has there been any resistance to that?
12:00