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 łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees will automatically update to show only the łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of łÉČËżěĘÖ 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 2597 contributions
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Colin Beattie
Can you briefly indicate what actions the board has taken to review and refine the board risk assurance framework? That question might be for Pamela Dudek or for the chair.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Colin Beattie
My focus, which is on two areas, is partly based on some of the comments that you made last week. Some of my questions probably relate to points that fellow members have raised, but I would like to get the sequence right in my mind because it is a bit complicated.
CMAL awarded the contract to build the ferries—it was the body that signed that off. There was no ministerial direction to do so—jump in if I am telling porkies; I am trying to get it right—so there would be no piece of paper for that. Is that correct?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Colin Beattie
On the face of it, I would agree. However, as you have said, there is ambiguity. As I said, if I was a Scottish minister receiving the covering email, I would just have looked at the bit that said
“broadly comparable with the tender specification”
and so on, and said, “Right. They seem to have done their job.” However, that is probably for a different discussion.
On FMEL, one of the concerns that I raised last week was about the destination of the money and what has happened to it. We can speculate that the ÂŁ45 million, which was really for working capital, paying salaries and keeping the yard ticking over, was used for that purpose. However, tens of millions of pounds went into the yard and there is no evidence that, at the point of nationalisation, work or equipment of that value was lying there. What happened to it?
You have said that, because FMEL was a private company, Audit Scotland has been unable to carry out proper due diligence. Now that it has been nationalised, do we own that history? Can we look retrospectively at what happened to the money? There must be some record of it some place.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Colin Beattie
It seems to me that there was an awful lot of evidence in the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee report. I would have hoped that that might have led you down that road without waiting for the Public Audit Committee.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Colin Beattie
On the back of what you have been saying, could you indicate where you believe the healing process is at this point?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Colin Beattie
I am coming to that in due sequence, I hope.
CMAL awarded the contract in its capacity as the procuring authority. It expressed concerns about the absence of a full refund guarantee, and it put in place mitigations with regard to that. There is a question about the timing of that. FMEL did not say anything about being unable to comply with the terms of the tender until after the announcement was made, which is a bit odd. You would have thought that, at the time of responding to the tender document, it would have said, “No, we cannot comply with those bits.”
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Colin Beattie
When the yard was nationalised, the assets in it must have been valued. Was their value comparable to the money that came in to produce them?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Colin Beattie
Is that not an area that it is important for us to look at? One of the key things that this committee does is follow the public pound; here, we have a situation in which tens of millions of pounds have been poured into a project with not that much to show, value-wise, at the end of it.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Colin Beattie
Are you considering doing such a review?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 April 2022
Colin Beattie
Did CMAL give a formal document with detailed concerns that got to ministers? I am asking you that question because I am not sure.