Official Report: search what was said in Parliament
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.
Searching by different views
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
- Report: this is the whole Official Report for a particular meeting of a committee or Parliament
- Item of business: this is each individual agenda item in an Official Report. For example, Portfolio Questions would be the item of business in a Meeting of the Parliament report
- Contribution: this is each time someone has made a spoken contribution to a meeting.
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.
Search by MSP
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.
Searching by keyword
There are two types of keyword search:
- A keyword search without quotation marks will look for every instance of each word used and rank the results by frequency and proximity. It will also include variants of the keywords using “porter stemming”. This is when the search looks for the “stem” of a word regardless of its ending. So, for example, a search for [salmon farm] will return each instance of “salmon” and each instance of “farm” as well as potentially including results for “farms”, “farmed” and “farming”.
- A keyword search with quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase used. So, for example, a search for “salmon farm” in quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase.
Combining search filters
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.
More complex keyword searches
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
- a search for “salmon farm” AND “Loch Lomond” will return only results which include both exact phrases
- a search for “salmon farm” NOT “Loch Lomond” will return results for “salmon farm” but exclude results which also include “Loch Lomond”
- a search for “salmon farm” OR “Loch Lomond” will return all results for “salmon farm” and all results for “Loch Lomond” regardless of whether they appear together
Searching by date
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:
- Current session (all Official Reports since the current sessions started)
- Last 6 months
- Last 12 months
- each of the previous sessions of Parliament. (Selecting the information icon above the “Select a time period” menu will give you the exact dates for each session.)
- All sessions
- You can also choose to select a custom date range, although adding a Start or End date will mean the search automatically defaults to this option.
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.
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Displaying 3346 contributions
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Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
P&O Ferries
Meeting date: 29 March 2022
Graham Simpson
If the shareholder was not putting pressure on you to do it, why did you do it?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
P&O Ferries
Meeting date: 29 March 2022
Graham Simpson
Right. So it did not come from the shareholder.
You said earlier—these are your words—that it was a unique situation. There is nothing unique about companies getting into trouble, as you describe it, having to make changes and, potentially, making redundancies. There is absolutely nothing unique in that. The difference with this situation is that any other company would have gone through proper process, so why did you not?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
P&O Ferries
Meeting date: 29 March 2022
Graham Simpson
I have a final question. Natalie Don asked you whether you would be prepared to accept £5.50 an hour. I do not think that you would be, because I have done a quick calculation based on your basic pay and not bonuses, and you are on a princely £156 an hour. That is pretty good going. How do you think the sacked workers think of you when they look at that rate of pay?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Topical Question Time
Meeting date: 29 March 2022
Graham Simpson
Jim McColl will be surprised to hear that he is being accused of shifting the blame. We need some straight answers to straight questions. Was it Keith Brown who approved the contract for the ferries? Why was CMAL’s advice not to go ahead ignored? Given that Jim McColl has said today that he would not have proceeded had he known of those concerns, should the Government not have told him?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Ferries
Meeting date: 23 March 2022
Graham Simpson
Will the member take an intervention?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Ferries
Meeting date: 23 March 2022
Graham Simpson
Does Ariane Burgess agree, therefore, that we need to increase the budget for ferry replacement, so that we can get more ferries?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Ferguson Marine (Port Glasgow) Holdings Limited
Meeting date: 23 March 2022
Graham Simpson
I thank the cabinet secretary for the advance sight of her statement and a copy of the letter from Ferguson’s that was sent to the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee.
The Auditor General’s report is scathing. It should make uncomfortable reading for ministers and, frankly, they should be ashamed. We now learn from the cabinet secretary that, as well as further delays, extra costs of at least £8.7 million will be involved in the project to deliver ferries 801 and 802.
I am not going to give a big preamble, because we will come to a debate on ferries later, so I have just a few questions. Based on what the cabinet secretary has told us and what is in the Auditor General’s report, there is a bit of confusion over costs. The Auditor General says that
“the total cost of the ... project is currently estimated to be at least £240 million”,
which is significantly more than the cabinet secretary told us.
In addition to that, who is to blame for the cabling problem? I might have this wrong, but the cabinet secretary seems to suggest that it was the people who put the cabling in. I do not think that that is true. I think that the problem happened after the cables went in. Can the cabinet secretary give a clear and simple answer to that question?
Finally, on the report from the Auditor General, why did ministers ignore CMAL’s advice not to award the contract to Ferguson’s? Will the cabinet secretary now agree to hold a public inquiry?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Ferries
Meeting date: 23 March 2022
Graham Simpson
No.
There was then the £45 million loan to FMEL; we do not know what good that did. As things went belly up, the Government decided to nationalise the yard, but it had absolutely no idea what the condition of the boats was when it did so, so it could not have predicted how costs would rise.
Despite advice from PWC, there was no exit strategy—a bit like the situation with Prestwick airport. That is scandalous. Throughout the process, the various parties have been squabbling like children, unable to get on. There have been a string of disasters, with the latest being the discovery that the cables that were fitted on the vessel that was launched with blacked-out windows by Nicola Sturgeon in 2017 are now too short.
No one has accepted blame for that, or for anything in this fiasco. Ministers and others—including the highly paid and mistitled turnaround director—have moved on, but nobody’s head has rolled. That is the problem. There is no accountability—none—not just in Ferguson’s, but in the entire ferry system and especially in Government. To get to the bottom of that, we need a public inquiry.
There is a telling sentence in the Audit Scotland report, which states:
“The two new vessels, and subsequent additions and disposals, were expected to reduce the average age of CMAL’s major vessel fleet from 21 years ... to 12 years by 2025.”
How are we doing on that? The average age of the CalMac Ferries Ltd fleet is 23 years. The situation has got worse, and nobody’s head has rolled. We need new ferries, and we need to increase the budget for that in order to catch up. Graeme Dey reckoned that it would take £1.5 billion over 10 years; we are saying that it requires £1.4 billion. That would create a pipeline of work that could herald a boost for Scottish shipbuilding.
This is not some obscure topic. Having an ageing and unreliable ferry fleet affects people’s lives. This week, I have been speaking to island campaigners on Arran, Mull and Iona. A psychotherapist told me that he is dealing with increasing numbers of stressed-out patients. Other people have said that they have not been able to get to hospital appointments, because they cannot book a car space less than a few weeks in advance. The situation is also affecting tourism.
I have heard of bare shelves in shops, and I have seen the photographic evidence. Farmers cannot get feed and cannot get their animals to market. It goes on. Kids cannot get to school. People are thinking of giving up island life altogether—under the SNP.
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Ferries
Meeting date: 23 March 2022
Graham Simpson
I am grateful. Does the minister recognise concerns that £580 million is nowhere near enough and that the budget needs to be at least doubled?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Ferries
Meeting date: 23 March 2022
Graham Simpson
I say to Mr Gibson that ministers should listen to the experts. Perhaps if they had listened, we would not be in this mess, and we would not now be ordering ferries from Turkey.
