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 3123 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of NHS Forth Valley”
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Richard Leonard
Where are we with staff vacancy rates and so on?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of NHS Forth Valley”
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Richard Leonard
As has been suggested by other members of the committee, it might be useful if you could follow that up in writing with some more up-to-date information, so that we have that data on the record.
My final reflection follows on from the deputy convener’s previous salient question. Three of you are very new to what are very senior positions in the health board. Did the people who left go through any kind of exit interview?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of NHS Forth Valley”
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Richard Leonard
Do not misunderstand me: I am not asking you to send us copies, with people’s reasons for leaving, as a matter of public record; I am just asking whether, as a matter of good practice, you are monitoring those reasons so that you can establish if there are trends or other things.
Public Audit Committee
“Decarbonising heat in homes”
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Richard Leonard
Okay, but a recurring theme has come out in the report. The third recommendation in the report talks about the need to
“identify the staff numbers and skills”
required. It sounds as if a good old-fashioned workforce plan—which we speak about a lot at the Public Audit Committee—is needed. Is that in place? If it is not yet in place, what arrangements are under way to ensure that it is? Where are we on progress with that?
Public Audit Committee
“Decarbonising heat in homes”
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Richard Leonard
I do not know whether you have—or are willing to state on the record—a view on the dilution of targets in some cases and their abandonment in others. The original target was that, by 2030, 1 million homes out of the 2.5 million in Scotland would be converted, and that we would see a complete phasing out of all new gas boilers by around those target dates. We would also have 22 per cent of heat being generated by renewables; that percentage relates not to the number of households but to the measure of heat. All those targets seem to have been dropped.
Public Audit Committee
“Decarbonising heat in homes”
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Richard Leonard
Your report certainly indicates that you are calling into question some of those targets. There is also a credibility question, about whether the scale of change is sufficient. There are 2.5 million households in Scotland, but you refer to only 26,000 households having had heat pumps installed. That represents a completion rate of around 1 per cent, which, by my rough arithmetic, leaves more than 98 per cent of households having not had those conversions.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of NHS Forth Valley”
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Richard Leonard
I want to take us to a couple of broader areas. The first is governance. In exhibit 1 in the section 22 report, the Auditor General notes that concerns about governance arrangements in the health board have been flagged since May 2022, when there was a Scottish Government national planning and performance oversight group report. The terms of the independent corporate governance review were not agreed for another eight months, in January 2023, and the outcomes of that were not considered by the board until November 2023. That seems to be an inordinate delay in addressing something that is pretty fundamental to the functioning of the board. Maybe Janie McCusker will want come in on that and explain why that timeline looks as it does.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of NHS Forth Valley”
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Richard Leonard
Thank you. That is a useful introduction for us. Willie Coffey will ask the first question.
Public Audit Committee
Decision on Taking Business in Private
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Richard Leonard
Good morning. I welcome everyone to the seventh meeting in 2024 of the Public Audit Committee.
The first item on the committee’s agenda is to decide whether to take agenda items 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 in private. Do members agree to take those items in private?
Members indicated agreement.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2022/23 audit of NHS Forth Valley”
Meeting date: 29 February 2024
Richard Leonard
My question is: why did it take so long? Concerns about governance were flagged up in May 2022. Why did it take until January the following year for a review of governance arrangements to be established? Why did it take another eight months before the conclusions were considered by the board?
