Uniquely, the Home Office has kept National Archives assessors at bay. Samera Owusu Tutu hears the TNA bid for access.
The National Archives (TNA) has not had access to Home Office documents for over eight years, TNA director of information Carol Tullo told the Public
Administration Select Committee (PASC) on 22 July.
Tullo was giving evidence at a meeting on the preservation of files in the civil service. Since 2006, TNA has been carrying out information management assessments, which culminate in an action plans and recommendations, for all government departments – and the Home Office is now the only major department not to have been assessed.
Tullo explained that TNA has to be invited to carry out the assessment by individual departments. “There are some that have been a little unwilling,” she said. She added that she understands that “there is never a good time to have an audit or an assessment,” but made clear that she was looking forward to completing the Home Office work.
PASC member Paul Flynn asked whether TNA not being invited into the Home Office was connected “to the practice of the Home Office of destroying files without taking a record of their contents”: a reference to 114 documents — including a dossier from the 1980s alleging a Westminster paedophile ring — which the department last month announced were missing or destroyed.
Tullo denied any connection but Lib Dem MP Greg Mulholland pushed the point, asking whether the department had breached the Grigg recommendations – which set out how departments should assess the value of records and decide whether to keep them – in its handling of the missing files.
Tullo could not comment directly on the missing files or the ongoing inquiry into them, but conceded that the procedures were “clearly” not followed with regard to audit trails indicating who disposed of them and why.
“There is no way there should have been a disposal decision that was not clearly followed,” she said, particularly because the documents had not been “discarded just at the end of an inquiry, policy report or a piece of work,” but kept “for a sufficiently long time to be on the system, to have a reference.”
She also noted that the fact that TNA has not had access to the Home Office’s documents does not help public confidence in the department’s record-keeping. Nonetheless, she indicated that TNA has confidence in civil servants’ abilities to decide what records should be kept, saying that “government organisations are the best-placed bodies to understand their own information.”