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: 28 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Surely the Government could have been doing that over the past 15 years.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 March 2024
Jamie Greene
That sounds helpful. I am not entirely convinced that there is good public awareness of the support that is currently available. As I have said, from chatting to my neighbours, I do not think that any of them would know where to go for support for insulation, for example, so there is a massive exercise to be undertaken there. However, the big, fundamental issue is that two million homes are still gas mains supplied. What are we asking them to do? Are we asking them switch off that gas supply? I am sure that the energy companies would have something to say about losing a million customers.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 March 2024
Jamie Greene
I have the cold, but I will try to struggle through this.
I want to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. The Scottish Government estimates that it will cost £33 billion to deliver its heat in buildings strategy. We know from the Auditor General for Scotland’s report that around £1.8 billion of public funding has been committed, but I understand that £600 million of that is as yet unallocated and that around £0.5 billion of it is dedicated to supporting people who are in fuel poverty. That does not leave much for physical intervention. I guess that less than £1 billion of public money is going into physical intervention to move homes towards the strategy. My overarching question is: where will the other £32 billion come from?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Absolutely. The 2.5 million occupied homes account for 15 per cent of Scotland’s greenhouse gas emissions, using that phraseology. That is not the lion’s share of our emissions as a country, and it sounds to me that we are asking those with the least to do the most in this scenario and that legislation will force them to do so.
Let me give you a practical example because, out there in the real world, people want to know what all of this means for their household. My flat in Greenock is in a Victorian tenement with six flats, most of which are poorly insulated. None of them is double-glazed, and all of them run on gas boilers—to various extents of success, I should add. In that scenario, when the Government says, “Right, we’ve changed the law and you’re all going to have to move to some new green energy system, although we don’t know what it is yet,” the first question that all my neighbours will ask me is, “How much is that going to cost me, because I don’t have any money right now?”
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 March 2024
Jamie Greene
The average price of a property in the streets that I am talking about is about £35,000. You will crash the property market in that area if you suddenly require people to put in five £10,000 heating systems.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Let us look at some of that in the context of the fact that GEOAmey has received £4 million of financial penalties due to its performance issues. Since 2021, it has been served with five improvement notices on specific issues. That is the backdrop that we are working against here.
You have just responded by saying that there are two reasons for that. One is the one that you are leading on, by selectively quoting from the Auditor General’s report, which is the changing operating environment that you work in. I do not underestimate how challenging that is for you. However, for me, the main driver seems to be staffing issues, which we will come on to later in more detail. Surely, as a company that operates in the service industry, working with public sector organisations, you also operate in other jurisdictions. It sounds to me a little bit as though you have gone into the contract here in Scotland with your eyes wide shut. Surely the challenging changes of scenario in contract terms that you operate in would have been known to you at the time of entering into the contract. It sounds to me as though you are saying that the failures are everyone else’s fault but your own.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 March 2024
Jamie Greene
I know that others will want to come in, and we have lots of questions for you today. First, however, I will say that I spent two years on the Scottish Parliament’s Criminal Justice Committee and I know that, although the majority of stakeholders in the courts and in the prisons whom the committee met when we visited those places in person spoke very highly of the individuals who work in your organisation—it is important to put that on the record—they had very few positive comments to make about the company in general.
To go back to my first question, GEOAmey is an experienced organisation in the public sector, with large contracts in other jurisdictions, so why on earth did you go into a contract that was so tight that it did not allow you the flexibility to change the contract terms or operating model as the environment that you worked in changed? Clearly, it has changed substantially—in your view, it has changed more than it should have, according to the contract that you went into. You must employ some pretty decent solicitors to help with the contract wording and commercial negotiations, so why does the contract not allow for those substantial changes in the environment that you work in?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Can you say what the Government will do to support people in the scenario that I have outlined? I do not know the answer to that question.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you for your frank opening statement, Mr Jones—we do not often hear one of those in committees. However, having said that, I want to ask you the following. You have just repeated the phrase that you treat the Auditor General’s report as “balanced and accurate”. The report’s opening gambit is that
“The ongoing poor performance of the contract is resulting in delays and inefficiencies across the justice sector, impacting on policing, prison services and the courts.”
Is that a balanced and accurate description of your operating performance?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 March 2024
Jamie Greene
The contract said that you needed between 650 and 700 officers but, at the lowest point, you had only 510, so of course that will put pressure on your ability to deliver services. That is not anyone else’s fault but your own.