Lord Wallace of Saltaire
Main Page: Lord Wallace of Saltaire (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
The Earl of Courtown
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, refers to the transitional arrangements, the timetable for which was established by the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. It set out the agreed timetable for transitioning from the 30-year to 20-year rule, which should be completed by 2023.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I ask in particular about the Hanslope Park FCO archives. My wife, with a number of other scholars, visited them some time ago and we are grateful to the FCO for that. There was a huge set of files there—somewhere between 600,000 and 1 million—many of which have not been catalogued, let alone cleared. We were grateful to the Foreign Office for providing a number of retired diplomats to assist in this. Can we have a commitment from the Government that they will continue to provide additional funds so that those files can be sorted and cleared as quickly as possible, given how enormous the archive is?
The Earl of Courtown
The noble Lord makes a good point. The amount of files in various departments to go through—some relating way back to prisoner of war details and details of those serving in the armed services—is enormous. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is working as hard as it can to clear this backlog.