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: 7 March 2024
Jamie Greene
So that £300 million could, in theory, be converted to the capital budget, which I presume would go some way to filling the £1.3 billion shortfall that you have projected—I think that that is the figure that you gave.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 7 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Absolutely—that is a decision for ministers. What I am getting at is that the figures that you gave were forecasted real-terms cuts, whereas that is potential real cash as opposed to deflationary-valued money. In other words, the money could go some way towards dealing with any potential deficit, should it be spent in that way. Further, it is new money—it did not exist yesterday morning, for example—so I presume that you had not already forecasted it in your budgets.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 7 March 2024
Jamie Greene
Ms Stafford, where are you getting the 8.7 per cent figure from? What is it made up of? The briefing that we have from the Auditor General forecasts that it will be 7 per cent, and we have heard other individuals talk about 10 per cent. You have today mentioned 8.7 per cent, which is a new figure. What levels of future inflation are you basing that on, based on the latest revised inflationary rates?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 7 March 2024
Jamie Greene
In other words, it is a moving feast. If and when inflation reduces, that number reduces, and it has already reduced substantially in the past few days. Is there a possibility that the 8.7 per cent figure could become 5 or 4 or 3 per cent?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 7 March 2024
Jamie Greene
We do, and it is certainly moving in the right direction, which is positive. However, it perhaps raises a wider question. I presume that, when a lot of projects were budgeted for in the first place, we were in a different world, where inflation was extremely low and interest rates were almost non-existent, at towards 0 per cent. When the Scottish Government’s various directorates were forecasting the costs of large infrastructure projects, to what extent were they budgeting for a potential rise in interest rates? In other words, was the total cost of a project based on the interest rates that existed at the time? Might it have been more prudent to factor in any potential rise in interest rates, knowing that there was a possibility that they could increase? Where do we sit against that? How realistic were those forecasts?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Jamie Greene
What are the key take aways, so that a member of the public who is watching this meeting can have confidence in what is happening?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Jamie Greene
It would be great to have any additional updates that you can provide.
It is interesting that much has been mentioned about workforce issues, and we have talked in great detail about the importance of executive leadership. The other key finding from the external review of corporate governance is about the
“root cause of many of the significant challenges”
that you face as a health board. The review states that one root cause is
“the failure to agree an appropriate business model for the delivery of integrated health and social care services”.
We have not spent a lot of time on that aspect this morning. Have things improved?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Jamie Greene
Appendix 2 of the report is on the delivery schemes. It seems to be a complicated and complex subsidy environment. There are a number of schemes. We have warmer homes Scotland, which is delivered by Warmworks. We have area-based schemes, which are delivered by local councils. We have Home Energy Scotland grants, which are delivered by the Energy Savings Trust, and so on. The number of households that are getting proper conversion of heating systems out of that is in the tens of thousands, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands or millions.
It seems to be quite a complex landscape, as other members have mentioned. Could it be simplified? The risk is that if you leave things to the market alone and people’s only exposure to accessing improvements is via the private sector advertising those schemes with a view to making profit in their own way, it becomes quite a dangerous environment for the consumer.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Jamie Greene
That is based on the assumption that we will have the people to do the work. As you said, there is a huge number of people out there who can install new gas boilers, but there will need to be a marked shift to installing new technologies and maintaining them on an on-going basis.
There has been a fair amount of pushback from the industry about what is on offer to incentivise it to retrain and reskill staff if the market does not exist. It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, of course. Do you think that the Government is acutely aware of that? Do you think that the plans that it has produced to ensure that we have the people to carry out the transition are robust?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Jamie Greene
That is fine. My parting question is for Ms McCusker. It is your last day in the job as chair. What would your advice be to the incoming chair?