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 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.
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Displaying 1837 contributions
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Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of UHI Perth”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
In relation to paragraph 18, on capacity issues, I was struck that you seem to make a direct link between the board’s inability to have a broad financial outlook at UHI Perth and a lack of capacity in the college’s finance team. You say that the capacity issues were
“contributing to delays to starting work on the 2024/25 budget.”
You go on to say that that has been an issue since 2018. It was reported back in the 2018 audit that there were capacity issues, so it is seven years, now, that there have been capacity issues, and the knock-on effect of that is where we are today. Is that not a concern?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of UHI Perth”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
We know what the deficit was in that year. Do you know what the turnover of the business—I say “business” but I mean the operation—was over that same financial year? We know that it was spending more than it had, but can you put it into context?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of UHI Perth”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
Thank you for clarifying the language that has been used.
I am trying to understand the role that the SFC, as the funding body, would have played in all of this and its relationship—or lack thereof—with the board that had oversight and governance. You are probably aware of the session that we had with the Ethical Standards Commissioner—I am sure that you would have paid close attention to that—during which this issue came up in a much wider discussion of the quality and performance of board members across public sector bodies. Intriguingly, Mr Bruce made it clear that it is not part of his role to look at board governance. My question is, whose role should it be?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of UHI Perth”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
Thank you.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“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 [Draft]
“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 [Draft]
“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 [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of UHI Perth”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
This is why I am a bit confused. Clearly, the college was trying, as a lot of colleges are, to expand its income streams by looking at sector-specific schemes that encourage commercial interest and can feed a pipeline of well-trained resource into growth industries. UHI Perth’s Air Service Training subsidiary, which had been around for nearly 100 years and had trained thousands of pilots and engineers in a growth market, given the massive worldwide shortage of aircraft maintenance engineers, went bust. The market is there and the sector is growing, so did you see management issues or a strategic problem? Things are not marrying up to me—I do not understand why that business of all businesses went bust.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
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 [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2023/24 audit of UHI Perth”
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Jamie Greene
In what was a relatively small organisation.
