Ministry of Justice
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Review of the 30 year rule

Review of the 30 year rule

MINISTRY OF JUSTICE News Release (010/09) issued by COI News Distribution Service. 29 January 2009

BIG REDUCTION IN '30 YEAR RULE' RECOMMENDED BY INDEPENDENT REVIEW TEAM

The independent team appointed by the Prime Minster and the Lord Chancellor to review the '30 year rule' under which public records are released has today recommended its reduction to 15 years.

The review team, chaired by Paul Dacre and supported by Professor Sir David Cannadine and Sir Joe Pilling, was asked to consider changes to the rule, introduced in 1968 by Harold Wilson, in the light of the Freedom of Information Act.

The review recommends that the new 15 year rule - which will apply retrospectively to all documents - be phased in over a period of 15 years.

It also calls for ...

* An independent review of the "Radcliffe" rules on the publication of memoirs by former ministers, civil servants and special advisers to "overhaul and update" them in the light of a reduction to the 30 year rule and the introduction of the FoI Act.

* The amending of the Civil Service Code to help ensure civil servants keep full, accurate and impartial records of government business.

* It to be made clear that special advisers, as temporary civil servants, have a duty to keep a full record of their non-political activities which will be archived and released in the same way as any other official documents.

The report also concludes that the government and Whitehall have some way to go in fully comprehending the implications of the digital revolution on record keeping. And it urges the government to review the existing strategy for the preservation of digital records "as a matter of urgency" to ensure these records are placed in a sustainable storage environment by the time they are ten years old. Failure to do so, the report says, would be "disastrous".

ENDS

Notes:

1. Paul Dacre is editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers and Chairman of the Editors' Code Committee of the Press Complaints Commission. Professor Sir David Cannadine was until recently the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Professor of British History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Sir Joseph Pilling is a former Permanent Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office.

2. A full copy of the review, along with evidence presented to the review team, is available on the Commission's website, http://www.30yearreview.org.uk

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