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 2072 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of UHI Perth”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
Who was asking questions of whom throughout the process is ground that has been covered already. However, given that the funding would have come primarily via a third party—in this case, the Funding Council—it strikes me as particularly unusual that it would have signed off the release of those funds to a body that had not presented financial accounts to it. That seems to me quite unusual. Is that what has driven your report—the unusualness of that situation?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of UHI Perth”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
In what was a relatively small organisation.
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of UHI Perth”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
In this case, would it not have been a primary function of the board to say to the organisation, “Have you prepared a budget for this financial year?” If the answer to that question was no, what on earth was the board doing?
Public Audit Committee
“Our impact: Monitoring and evaluation report 2025”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
Thank you for your report. I can see that you have sent somebody on a course on how to do lots of bar charts and pie charts. However, they were not all clear to me in setting out how you report data. I will go to the beginning of the report and to the high-level exhibit 6. Over the years 2022-23 and 2023-24, the data set that you used to produce the report covers 11 performance audits, which made 63 recommendations, and 235 annual audits, which made a total of 949 recommendations across the two years. Is that correct?
Public Audit Committee
“Our impact: Monitoring and evaluation report 2025”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
I was trying to get my head round the bigger picture. The report goes into quite granular detail on the different types of recommendations and the various stages that they are at, if you can work out what the dark blue and the light blue shading mean. However, once I have got over that, there is still a point that I am trying to get my head around. Taking the 2023-24 year, because it had the higher number of annual audits of public bodies, and the 459 recommendations that came out of all those reports, I simply want a top line. Of those 459, how many to date are fully implemented, how many are in progress and how many have not been touched at all? I could not find that information in any of the bar charts. If it is there, please point me to it.
Public Audit Committee
“Our impact: Monitoring and evaluation report 2025”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
That is helpful—thank you. On performance audits, in paragraph 36, you state:
“We do not currently have systems in place to follow-up recommendations made in national reports to all local authorities or multiple bodies.”
The term “follow-up” is a bit vague. What do you mean by that?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of UHI Perth”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
In your experience, is it okay for an organisation to say that it is spending more money than it has? That is just being honest, is it not?
Public Audit Committee
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of UHI Perth”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
My understanding is that the root factors of the deficit stemmed from three particular areas. The first related to negotiating pay settlements as part of national bargaining, which obviously had a knock-on effect locally. Secondly, there were issues relating to the Air Service Training scheme, which I will ask about separately, because that was another interesting development.
The third reason for the deficit was a drop in student numbers—the difference between the projected number of full-time equivalent students and the actual number of students who took up courses. While you were speaking, I had a look at the college’s course brochure. One could do a wide and varied range of courses, covering further education and higher education. Was there any feedback on why the number of actual students was so much lower than the number that had been forecasted?
Public Audit Committee
“Our impact: Monitoring and evaluation report 2025”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
As a member of the Public Audit Committee, I am looking for trends and patterns. There is a broadly similar number of bodies and recommendations, but is there a pattern of fewer or more recommendations being implemented in the early stage or in the long term, or in those that are just completely ignored? We make a big deal of the 93 per cent figure. Public bodies sit where you are sitting now and say, “Yes, we accept the recommendations of the report,” but those are just words. It is about how many of those actually translate into action. We have a bigger remit. You have no statutory duty to follow up on the recommendations or any locus in that respect, but we do, so that is the sort of data that I need to see the direction of travel.
Public Audit Committee
“Our impact: Monitoring and evaluation report 2025”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
Do you think that Audit Scotland gives enough cognisance to some of the factors that may explain why audited bodies have been unable to implement recommendations? There are a number of external factors. Your recommendations talk a lot about financial sustainability and workforce issues, but there is also a wider regulatory and legislative environment that these bodies are working in, which is outside of their control. Do you think that your focus is too much on whether a body did or did not deliver on the recommendations and does not acknowledge that, even if they wanted to deliver on them, it might be impossible for them to do so?
