Freedom of Information Act 2000

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, I can think of nowhere else where such a brief debate could contain so much. We are all enormously grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, for the manner in which he introduced the debate, just as many of us are grateful to him for all that he has done for contemporary history.

I speak as one who for some 24 years was on the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts and sat on the council of archives, and who occasionally had to chair a panel to adjudicate on whether a certain document should indeed be released. I therefore have a great deal of sympathy with the general case that the noble Lord so brilliantly and wittily made when he opened the debate.

There are other things that we have to consider, though, and some of them have been touched upon in this debate. The importance of archives is such that we must not endanger them or their preservation. My noble friend Lord Black talked about the digital and electronic archive, which is something to which we have not yet devoted sufficient attention.

My noble friend Lady Shephard of Northwold talked very eloquently about the need for conventions. It is truly important that we have those. What we do not want is an incentive to destroy or an incentive for people to go into the back garden of an embassy, which I was once told about when I visited an iron curtain country. That was the only place where people dared talk. We need to have the conversations between Ministers and civil servants recorded and released at the appropriate time.

However, the appropriate time is not always necessarily after 15 or 20 years. Sometimes it has to be longer. Although the noble Lord, Lord Bew, said that we no longer live in the age of Gladstone, in which a statesman could be active for 50 years, maybe he is being a bit premature. We live in an age of longevity. At the moment we have three party leaders who could well still be active in politics in 20 years’ time. I should not like to think that they were being driven to make difficult decisions on the sofa or somewhere that are not adequately recorded so that the Hennessys of the future and those who look back, not as contemporary historians but as historians viewing a whole sweep of history, are deprived of essential evidence.

In this, as in all things, we have to get the balance right. If we take the judicious approach of the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, tempered by the cautious words of the noble Lords, Lord Wilson and Lord Armstrong, we will have the ideal solution. I know that my noble friend Lord McNally has a reputation for being something of a Solomon. We will have to hear what he says to us tonight. However, I hope he will be able to assure us that he has a passionate care for archives, but complete archives, and that he will do nothing to damage in any way the material that future historians will need.