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Tessa Stirling, Cabinet Office (Chair)
FCO
GCHQ
Security Service
Home Office
Ministry of Defence
The National Archives
Professor Christopher Andrew, Corpus Christi
Professor Peter Hennessy, Queen Mary's
Alan Glennie, Cabinet Office (Secretary)
The minutes of the previous meeting were accepted subject to a minor draft change.
It was confirmed that the Ministers had now been informed about the existence of the Group.
It was agreed that the webpage providing information about the Group should be published on the Cabinet Office internet site once the ‘National Intelligence Machinery
’ booklet had been submitted to the ISC. Once the webpage had been published the Security Service would arrange for it to be linked to the Security Service internet website.
The Group also agreed that a summary of its discussions should be published on the web page.
Details of security and intelligence records released at The National Archives during 2004 would be published on the Cabinet Office internet site and linked to The National Archives website. The lists of released records would not be intended to be authorative.
With the advent of FOI, it might seem superficially that the justification for having an official history programme could be weakened. However, the historians on the group felt that, there was now a better argument than ever for the programme, for example, Professor Milward's history on the UK's Accession to the European Union gave a solid and thorough understanding of the topic. Such authoritative works were able to save researchers considerable time and added a great deal of value to the store of knowledge on a subject. The history programme was important to preserve because they were a great British strength and were something that we did better than any other country. Freedom of Information provided access to specific pieces of information in an unstructured way and the information published through the Official History programme was more complete and in context. The current programme of histories was now nearly complete and a new list of topics for possible official histories would need to be considered by the Official Committee on Official Histories.
The Group considered the implications arising from the full introduction of the Freedom of Information Act on 1 January. They expressed concern about the possibility of the diversion of resources from work on the transfer of 30 years old material to TNA and that the rules on release of information were now more restrictive than under the Waldegrave Initiative. Many requests for information had been placed hoping that departments would carry out research on behalf of the requestor. This was a possible issue for the Information Commissioner who may recognise the problems such requests give to departments.
There was also concern that many of the requests would be for material inside 30 years. Researchers would not wish to make tranches of requests and did not want surprises. It would therefore be preferable there should be conversations between departments and researchers about what was possible under FOI rather than researchers making formal requests. What was needed was a mechanism that would be mutually beneficial to researchers and departments.
It was noted that in the United States FOI requests could take 18 – 24 months to be answered.
The next meeting will be held on Friday, 17 June at 10.00am.
Cabinet Office
12 June 2005
