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 ˿ and committees will automatically update to show only the ˿ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of ˿ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of ˿ 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 October 2021
Colin Beattie
In that case, you also accept that there is an issue around accountability and lines of responsibility. It is therefore a question of what you will do to change what is happening now in order to ensure that those required outcomes are achieved.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 October 2021
Colin Beattie
I will ask more questions about that in a second. Page 5 of our Scottish Parliament information centre briefing shows the proportion of the population that has received the vaccine. Pretty much all the way down the line there is a discrepancy between those who got dose 1 and those who got dose 2. It is a not insignificant discrepancy, overall. Why is that?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 October 2021
Colin Beattie
Ah. It is a private paper. It shows that, by local authority area, there is a discrepancy of a few percentage points between take-up of dose 1 and take-up of dose 2. Did you encounter that during your audit? Did you note that?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 October 2021
Colin Beattie
Has that impact assessment been published yet?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 October 2021
Colin Beattie
Actually, I would like clarification on something first.
You mention in the briefing paper that vaccines were allocated according to the Barnett formula, so I presume that they were allocated on a population basis. Were there any issues with that, given the fact that Scotland has different demographics and, therefore, different priorities for the volume of vaccine that would be needed at any particular time? Was that taken into account in any way and did you note whether any issues arose from it?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 October 2021
Colin Beattie
I turn to some of the points that Willie Coffey raised. Exhibit 4 contains some fairly detailed information, the source of which is, I understand, Public Health Scotland. Given our previous experience with data, are you comfortable that the figures are accurate?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 October 2021
Colin Beattie
Given that we want everybody to understand fully where they are and what they do and to work together cohesively, would Community Justice Scotland benefit from additional powers to support its role—for example, powers that would enable it to drive a more strategic approach to planning—and create a better, more disciplined line of accountability?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 October 2021
Colin Beattie
Yet stakeholders and Audit Scotland have expressed concerns.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 October 2021
Colin Beattie
You mean Community Justice Scotland carrying on with what it has been doing before, which has not really given the hoped-for results.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 28 October 2021
Colin Beattie
Data is essential, but if people do not necessarily fully understand the responsibilities and areas of accountability and so forth, you have a fundamental problem right from the start. It seems that the softly, softly approach behind the scenes over a number of years has not delivered. There must therefore be a need to revisit that to see what needs to be done to pull it together.