Freedom of Information Act 2000

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2012 Lords Chamber

Tabled by

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how extensions in the scope of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and their transparency agenda will affect the availability of government records to the public.

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

My Lords, I very much welcome this evening’s debate on access to official information and I am grateful to so many noble Lords for wishing to speak. It is, I think, the first time that your Lordships’ House has had a chance to discuss the plans for additional openness announced by the noble Lord, Lord McNally, on 7 January 2011. He outlined four changes that the coalition proposed to make: increasing the number of organisations to which freedom of information requests can be made by bringing in such bodies as the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Financial Services Ombudsman; consulting on drawing in a range of further bodies, such as examination boards; undertaking post-legislative scrutiny to see how the Freedom of Information Act 2000 has worked in practice—a task which the Justice Committee in the other place will take up next month; and—especially dear to my historian’s heart—making most public records available at the National Archives after 20 years instead of the current 30 years.

I know that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, is keen on this. He has been a good friend to historians. He has always been willing to talk to my students about the 1976 IMF crisis when he became a prime historical exhibit while working in No. 10 for the greatly missed Lord Callaghan of Cardiff.

Perhaps I may this evening mirror the Government’s approach by taking a wider-lens view of freedom of information and look at it as a question of access to official information as a whole. To do so, our field of vision needs to encompass not just the workings of the Freedom of Information Act, for access is a matter of linkages embracing with FOI the output of the public records system and the often neglected, although related, matter of government-commissioned official histories—a subject on which the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank, led a debate in your Lordships’ House four years ago.

Before turning to public records policy, I must first declare an interest as president of the Friends of the National Archives and as Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary, University of London. Given my trade, I especially welcome the coalition’s pledge to implement the provisions of Part 6 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, which was passed in the last days of the Labour Government and created a new 20-year norm to replace the 30-year rules that have been operational since 1972. The plan is that from January 2013 an extra year’s worth of declassifications will be added to the 30-year process until the 10-year gap has been closed.

I understand that the statutory instrument for triggering the new archival flow has yet to be signed. I am neither a pessimist nor a sniffer of conspiracies but I would welcome reassurance from the Minister on this point. In the same spirit, I would welcome publication of the 20-year rule guidelines for record reviewers in government departments—who are fondly known as “the weeders” —so that Parliament can check that they will be no more restrictive than the current ones for 30-year releases.

I am confident that the new 20-year rule will stimulate a cataract of fine theses and excellent books, for a fresh run of documents is like giving the historical profession a new currency with which to trade. This is precisely what happened in the 1990s after the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave of North Hill, who I am delighted to see in his place, as Sir John Major’s Minister for Open Government, put in place what we historians called, and still do, the “Waldegrave initiative” whereby departments were encouraged to re-examine particularly sensitive files that had been retained for longer than 30 years.

By 1998, when Whitehall stopped measuring its yield, 96,000 files had been declassified as a result, which filled gaps in the defence, intelligence and nuclear elements of the post-1945 secret state. I am full of admiration for the departmental records teams in Whitehall and the staff of the National Archives. I am equally aware of the pressure on budgets and manpower, but I urge the Government to consider commissioning a “Waldegrave 2” to run alongside preparations for the 20-year rule to ensure that as little possible remains in departmental strong rooms, including files that were still too sensitive to release in the 1990s but that might safely be declassified now. If the Minister agrees, we might even call the initiative “McNally 1”.

Those 30-year releases are a form of delayed freedom of information. FOI disclosures are welcome and often highly revealing, but they are fragmentary and it is runs of documents that historians need. FOI, to be candid, is not an unmixed blessing for scholars because it has led to greater caution in what is written down.

I turn now to official histories. I have not written one myself, but I am very grateful to those who have, not least for providing a window into Whitehall short of 30 years, and, in Christopher Andrew’s authorised history of MI5 and Keith Jeffery’s history of MI6 up to 1949, opening up windows into the necessarily most opaque parts of the secret state. The Cabinet Office, under the energetic guidance of Mrs Tessa Stirling, is the engine room of official histories. Thirteen have been commissioned since 2000, eight of which have already been published. The Pilling report of 2009 urged still more and suggested enhancements in the commissioning process, while the Hamilton report of the same year laid out improvements in the marketing of the books produced. The Government have not yet pronounced on Pilling-Hamilton. I hope the noble Lord, Lord McNally, will this evening be able to accept the recommendations and undertake to implement them when funds allow.

For the general public the most visible manifestation of the public records system is the annual festival of 30-year revelations in the media between Christmas and the new year. This time, understandably, it was the riots of 1981 that attracted most attention. Few noticed a security file in the No. 10 papers of the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, dealing with a leak inquiry instigated by the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, then Cabinet Secretary, into a story on civil contingencies planning that I had written in the Times as that paper’s Whitehall correspondent. I am glad to say that the investigation got absolutely nowhere, but its declassification, as I think my noble friend Lord Armstrong would agree, has brought a frisson of amusement to both of us—a kind of bond between us after all these years.

There is, however, a truly hidden treasure in the latest releases for those with a taste for personal and political drama, after, perhaps, seeing that remarkable film “The Iron Lady”. It is a Cabinet Office file containing the records of the third world war that never was of March 1981: a transition-to-war drill exercised in great secrecy in Whitehall every two years in which officials role-played Ministers. It ends with the United Kingdom under conventional and chemical weapons attacks from the Soviet Union and its allies, and the British War Cabinet reaching and crossing the nuclear threshold, with the role-played—I emphasise that—Mrs Thatcher declaring that never before had a Cabinet been faced with such a grim choice between capitulating to a powerful and malevolent aggressor and embarking on a course of action that could end with the destruction of civilisation. It is gripping, desperate and—mercifully—fictional stuff, which cries out, I think, to be converted into a film script.

To finish by returning to reality, I stress that well organised and sustained access to official information, current and past, is crucial to the accountability of our system of government and the richness of the historical residue that clings to the Velcro of our collective memory. Such practices enhance the depth and quality of the rolling national conversation about government policy and politics without which no open society can flourish.