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 1619 contributions
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 2 May 2024
Jamie Greene
Can you indicate how much?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 2 May 2024
Jamie Greene
There have been penalties of around £5 million. However, a recalibration of the contract seems to suggest that GEOAmey is receiving £4 million over a number of years in payments additional to the original contracted value. Is that correct?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 2 May 2024
Jamie Greene
Wow—you are weeks away from hitting your absolute capacity. What happens when you hit that point? Do you say to the courts, “Please do not send us any more people. We cannot take them,” or do you say to ministers, “We have to start releasing prisoners”? Which of the two is preferable?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 2 May 2024
Jamie Greene
Here is what I do not understand. In your opening statement, you said that we are sending fewer people to prison each year, but the prison population is rising—it is at its highest level in nearly five years.
The Parliament has made a number of legislative changes, some of which have been mentioned, such as the Management of Offenders (Scotland) Act 2019, and there is the presumption against short-term sentences, the changes in sentencing guidelines for under-25s and a massive shift in alternatives to custody. Whatever your views on those policies—for or against—some of which were rather controversial, we have made such changes already, and yet the prison population is going up.
Are the courts simply not following the guidelines and are sending too many people to prison, or does the nature and profile of those prisoners mean that we are sending the right number of people to prison, but the Scottish Government has simply not built the capacity to deal with that?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 2 May 2024
Jamie Greene
Or, potentially, those other countries have less serious organised crime or sexual offences.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 2 May 2024
Jamie Greene
Both of which are delayed, of course.
I will wrap up my line of questioning here. Is that not part of the issue? We would not be hitting this crunch point, people would not be living in inhumane conditions, you would not be threatened with litigation, and we would not be sitting on the precipice of mass riots in our prisons if you had built the prison capacity in the first place. HMP Greenock was described by HMIP as needing to be “bulldozed”. Barlinnie was described as being at risk of “catastrophic failure”. The list goes on and on. At what point over the past decade did the Government realise that it should have built capacity and replaced those prisons way before we hit this crunch point?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 2 May 2024
Jamie Greene
My final question may be more fundamental. What is the point of prison? Is it simply to lock people up and keep them away from the wider populace or is it to make sure that, if and when they come out of prison, they do not reoffend and they come out better people than when they went in?
I am concerned by what we have heard this morning and over the past couple of months and years. We are simply not rehabilitating people in prison. We are chucking them in there, locking them up for 23-plus hours a day, potentially breaching their human rights and then, at the end of their sentence, putting them back into society and expecting them not to reoffend. We are, clearly, failing in this.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 25 April 2024
Jamie Greene
Good morning to our guests. I want to get straight into the meat and bones of the content of the HMRC reports. There are more than 100 pages to digest and, as the convener said, we have not had much time to do that, but what is contained therein has been the source of a lot of commentary over the past 24 hours from an analysis point of view, but also from the media and, unfortunately, as is always the case, from a political point of view.
It is important that the committee gets under the skin of the facts and figures, so I ask HMRC to enlighten us on the key findings of the reports. They singularly pick out the year 2018-19, but nothing since then. They give a snapshot—I understand that—but it seems odd that we have had no further analysis of any subsequent years. Maybe you can comment on that. I would also like to know what you found when you analysed the 2018-19 tax year, when Scotland moved to a five-tier system. What is the situation regarding our income tax base? Is it better, worse or indifferent?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 25 April 2024
Jamie Greene
Okay. I know that other members have a lot of interest in that issue.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 25 April 2024
Jamie Greene
I understand that, but I have a concern that, if we have to wait five or six years for the 50-page reports that contain that data, it is impossible for them to be used to inform Government decisions. They just show what has happened, and not what might happen in the future. What we really need to know is what the trend has looked like over the past few years, particularly when there has been further divergence in tax bands and fiscal drag.
You said that there was a small or moderate loss of income. The analysis in your report says that it was about £60 million in the financial year 2018-19, but that related to a very small number of people. It does not take a lot of behavioural change or a lot of people to drop out of the Scottish tax system for there to be a fairly substantial loss in the income that the Government receives and, therefore, has available to spend on public services. Will you give us an indication of how worrying that figure might be? Table 19 in the report shows that just 60 people coming out of the system at the top rate equated to a loss of almost £38 million of income. That is huge.