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