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 1492 contributions
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2024
Jamie Greene
I am using that as example of new investment, new money, new build and the model that might accompany that scenario.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2024
Jamie Greene
Natural termination is the direction of travel, at least in your directorate?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2024
Jamie Greene
That would be helpful. I know that we said that the focus is on money but it is important to bear in mind that we are dealing with people.
My final question is about an issue that came up towards the end of last year. When Serco left the prison, did it take all the body-worn cameras away, or do the staff there at the moment still have them?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2024
Jamie Greene
I will shrink my questions into two. Mr Rennick, you will be aware of the constraints on the Government’s capital investment. A number of infrastructure projects have been paused and there will be no investment in them. Much of that decision will have direct consequences for your portfolio and new schools and prisons, for example. Other portfolios across the health sector, housing and so on will feel the same.
In the scenario in which the Government is saying that it does not have the cash to build this stuff up front, is there now an expectation that a shift to a different financing model will be inevitable? In other words, the private sector will stump up the cash up front and the Government will simply pay them back over a very long period of time. I appreciate that might not be the political thing to do in terms of the ministerial direction of travel, but from a value for money point of view, should that be considered?
10:15Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2024
Jamie Greene
Just to be clear, it was not a performance-related issue. There were no operational issues. It was solely, as you said, a policy decision. I will not use the word “political”, as that would not be fair on you, but it was certainly a ministerial decision that the Government wanted to go in that direction of travel, irrespective of the cost.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2024
Jamie Greene
In your previous appearance before the committee, which I will not revisit, we talked quite extensively about the pressures on the prison population. Where is HMP Kilmarnock in that regard? Is it one of the ones in the red? Is it nearing capacity? Do we have any issues there?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2024
Jamie Greene
You cannot go through a supermarket without being greeted by somebody with a body-worn camera. It seems odd that our prison staff do not have them.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2024
Jamie Greene
We look forward to that.
My second question is about PFI contracts, where there is still a bit more digging to be done and other members might do that. I am still a bit confused about how many such contracts are coming to an end in the next couple of years and what the cost to the public purse will be. We may revisit that before we end this evidence session, but do you expect those contracts to come to a natural end or are ministers mooting an early contract termination on some of them? There is a difference there and I presume there is a cost.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2024
Jamie Greene
My first question is to Teresa Medhurst. I appreciate that you may not want to answer this, but I will give it a try anyway. Did you want to take ownership of HMP Kilmarnock?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2024
Jamie Greene
Mr Rennick, you are next, I am afraid. Back in 2022, when I sat on the Justice Committee, I asked a similar question about the difference between privately run prisons and Government-run ones, and the response from His Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons response was that HMP Kilmarnock
“is the cheapest prison in Scotland”—[Official Report, Justice Committee, 9 November 2022; c 8.]
to run. My initial question is: was the decision to move the prison into public ownership based on value for money or was it solely a policy decision?