§ Mr. Alfred Dubs (Battersea, South)I welcome this opportunity to talk about the effect of public expenditure cuts on the work of the Public Record Office. I believe that a nation that takes pride in its history will take pride in, and have respect for, the way in which it keeps and preserves its historical records.
For that reason, the PRO was set up by Act of Parliament in 1838. It is known to be the repository of our national archives and its records go back 900 years. The Domesday Book and Magna Carta are in the archives at the PRO, which also houses the finest medieval records in the world, with the possible exception of the Vatican.
The Public Record Office is governed under the Public Records Acts 1958 and 1967. Clause 2(3) of the 1958 Act says:
It shall be the duty of the Keeper of Public Records to take all practicable steps for the preservation of records under his charge.The Act specifies the furnishing of indices and guides to the records kept at the PRO and specifies the publication of Government records to the general public after 30 years.I understand that the Public Record Office has 80 miles of shelves and that each year another mile of shelving is added. The PRO takes in more records in a year than the total stock of the department of manuscripts at the British Library. The department of manuscripts has more professional staff than the PRO, although that department has, perhaps, 2 per cent. or 3 per cent. of the total documents held at the PRO. I do not say that in order to suggest that the department of manuscripts does not do a good job or that it is overstaffed. I say that to show how poorly staffed is the PRO, given its responsibilities.
The Public Record Office does not eater only for lawyers, historians and the general public. It also provides a valuable service to Government Departments. In recent years the Foreign and Common- 1048 wealth Office was able to refer to the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1386 kept at the PRO.
There is an anomaly, however. When the new Departmental Select Committees were set up, the PRO appears not to have been assigned to any Committee. I hope that that situation will be re-examined, because it seems a pity that a valuable service, which is not a legal service, should not come within the scope of one of the Departmental Select Committees.
In 1978, the Wilson committee was established to inquire into and review certain aspects of the work of the Public Records Acts of 1958 and 1967. It was set up to look at the requirements of users, the volume of records generated by Government Departments, technological change as it might affect the format and storage of records, and particularly staffing, accommodation and the cost of maintaining public records. The committee was required to examine the need for economy in the use of resources and to make recommendations.
The Wilson committee is due to report later this year. However, we know that the PRO faces serious cuts in its budget. I question whether it is right or proper to make such cuts before the Wilson committee has reported and before its recommendations have been considered, given that those recommendations are concerned with the need for economy in the use of resources, the way in which costs can be dealt with and the way in which records are provided.
I should have thought that the very fact that the Wilson committee is due to report makes it ill advised to bring into effect public expenditure cuts which may pre-empt its results.
The total budget of the PRO is about £2 million and the intended reduction in expenditure is about £200,000 to £250,000. It is understandable that cuts in the PRO budget attract less attention than cuts in social services, education and housing, but there must be concern about the consequence of reducing the money available to the PRO to do its job, especially as some of those consequences may be long-term and cannot be reversed in a few years' time.
The effect of the cuts should be seen in the context of the rapidly increasing 1049 burden on the work and staff of the PRO. In 1968, the rule that records of Government Departments should be made available to the general public after 50 years was changed to a 30-year rule. That obviously increased the PRO's work. I understand that even now large numbers of documents that should be available to the public under the 30-year rule are not yet available.
A measure of the extra burden on the PRO is the number of non-industrial civil servants. That has clearly been increasing over many years, considered in terms of the present number of civil servants and the movement in the Civil Service. I know that there has been some reduction this year, but part of the burden of the work depends on what happened 30 years ago, when there were clearly increases in the numbers of non-industrial civil servants. They generated more records, which become every year the responsibility of the PRO.
In recent years, more Departments have come under the PRO—Customs and Excise, the Post Office, the National Coal Board, British Rail and many others. The number of visits to the search rooms of the PRO rose from 28,000 in 1958 to 87,700 in 1978. The number of documents produced by the PRO for people consulting them rose from 123,000 in 1958 to 476,000 in 1978.
The additional burden on the PRO is also falling as a consequence of the main Whitehall Departments cutting the staffs in their own records sections. About 200 Departments and organisations submit records to the PRO. Cuts in the Whitehall Departments' budgets put an additional burden on the PRO's resources since it oversees the work of the Whitehall Departments, takes in the volume of papers and so on and classifies them itself.
Apparently, there will be a 17 per cent. cut in the PRO budget. I regret that it has been hard to find out what is planned. I should have thought that secrecy was unnecessary in regard to the very Department which is supposed to make records available to the public.
At the moment, no specific function of the PRO can be cut, so what will happen as a result of expenditure reductions? First, there is the intention—perhaps not finally agreed on—to withdraw the public access at Chancery Lane so 1050 that the public will have to go to the Kew facility to look at records. That means that any Chancery Lane records requested by people at Kew will have to be shipped to Kew. That may damage old records, which is surely undesirable.
Secondly, staff cuts will make more difficult the work of the conservation department of the PRO. Even now the department is not able to keep pace with the increasing burden of repairs to documents and their deterioration. Large numbers of documents are not available for public inspection because they are too fragile to handle. A cut in the budget would mean fewer staff in the conservation department, which would make matters worse.
Thirdly, on the editorial side much work goes into listing and classifying documents so that they can be made available to those who request them. A reduction in editorial staff will hinder the classification of documents, which will in turn prevent their being available to those who want them. That will deny the basis of the operation of the Public Record office.
The cuts will do a great deal of harm to the many people who make use of the PRO today and in the future. I hope that the Minister will not seek refuge in the excuse that all Departments must meet their share of public expenditure cuts. At the very least, there should be an undertaking not to bring into effect any cuts until the Wilson report can be considered. As a generation, we should not be accused of damaging our historical records and doing a grave disservice to those who will be living in the country in the future.
§ The Solicitor-General (Sir I an Percival)I appreciate the interest shown in the subject by the hon. Member for Battersea, South (Mr. Dubs). The situation in which we find ourselves may in part be due to an insufficient number of people taking an interest in the matter. I am sorry that the debate did not come on on Monday night, but I am glad that, due to the persistence of the hon. Gentleman and the assistance of the Chair, we at least have this short debate.
The hon. Gentleman fairly recognises that we are discussing the effects of planned reductions in public manpower and expenditure. The question is to what 1051 extent they should affect this part of our undertaking. We have to look at the matter in the context of three crucial statements. The first was made by the Minister of State, Civil Service Department, on 6 December 1979, when he announced projected savings in Departments. He made a further statement on 14 March 1980, announcing a further reduction for the current year of 2½ per cent. in cash limits to offset pay increases. On 13 May, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced proposals to reduce the Civil Service to 630,000 in four years. All those statements are controversial, but we cannot divorce this matter from those basic considerations.
In that context, the Keeper of Public Records made proposals for manpower savings in his department. Every Keeper of Public Records wants to do his utmost to preserve our national heritage, and preserving and making the records available to the public are part of that heritage. However, he had to make proposals. Wherever the responsibility lies, it is not with him, except in so far as he has to make the detailed proposals for saving the money. I do not believe that the hon. Gentleman would wish me to go into the details of those proposals.
The proposals have attracted considerable criticism from various quarters. The Keeper and the Lord Chancellor continue to give the matter careful consideration. I have recently replied to a number of questions. We share the concern that the records must be preserved and, as far as possible, made available. No final decisions have been made. The hon. Gentleman knows where the emphasis lies. We must save money. We shall do what he suggests if we can, but I want him to know that the final decisions have not yet been taken. What he said—I am sorry that other hon. Members have not taken part in the debate—will be taken into account.
It is important to draw the distinctions between the three main questions upon which the subject that we are discussing must depend. First, there is the Government's overall policy in relation to the reduction of public manpower and expenditure. It is no good trying to isolate that from our considerations. We may have our differences about that, but we cannot isolate it. Secondly, there is the 1052 application of that policy to the Public Record Office. But the third question, and perhaps the one to which the hon. Gentleman most closely directed his attention, relates to the implementation of that policy within the PRO, assuming that it is to be implemented in respect of the PRO as well as other departments.
I do not think that the hon. Gentleman or the House would expect me to spend much time on the overall policy. I do not think that any reasonable person can question the present need for vigilance and rigour in the use of our resources in the public sector. I put that as neutrally as I can, because I do not think that there is any difference between us on what we want to see. I say that only for the purpose of putting the question into its proper context.
Of more immediate relevance is the application of that policy of cutting public expenditure to the PRO. There are those who say that, even accepting the need for such a policy, it should not be extended with full force to the PRO. The PRO is a small and active department, and I welcome the opportunity to pay tribute to it. I do not think that there is any waste there. It does an important job with enthusiasm. That is not unimportant. What I treasure above all is the fact that people do their job with enthusiasm. I can put up with not agreeing with them, so long as they have an enthusiasm for what they are doing. The PRO is a committed department. It knows what it wants, and it wants to do its best. I am all for supporting people who approach their jobs in that way.
I have sympathy with those who say that this small department should be exempted, but we must ask whether the PRO is so essential in all—I stress "in all"—its activities that it must be immune from cuts. I shall not attempt to answer that question. We could all agree that academic research at the PRO is not necessary for the preservation of life and limb or law and order, but I hope that we could also agree that academic research plays an important part in the pursuit of knowledge, upon which so much of our civilisation and freedom depend. I do not regard that as a sterile matter. It has a bearing on the preservation of freedom, and one of the reasons why I have been in politics for so long is that I think it important.
1053 It would be short-sighted to suggest that public records are unimportant. It would also be short-sighted—here the hon. Gentleman and I may disagree—to assume that the resources to maintain and to give access to our public records—I draw the distinction between maintaining them and giving access to them—can necessarily be provided from some less deserving public source. From my short experience on the Government Benches, I have learnt that it is all about priorities and that if we do something for somebody we must do something less for someone else.
The House will understand the difficulty of establishing a special case for the Public Record Office, because that may set off a chain reaction. I am not saying that there is not a special case, but it is still under consideration.
I turn now to the heart of the matter. Let us assume that the general policy of reducing expenditure must be applied to the Public Record Office. How will it be applied within the office? Here, we must remember that there are three separate functions of the Public Record Office. The first is the preservation by the Keeper of the records in his charge. It would be too awful to contemplate that those records should not be preserved. I put that as the first of his tasks, and so does he.
The Keeper's second function is that of selecting records for permanent preservation. Of course, he must preserve those records that are an important part of our national heritage, but that is a continuing process. He has to decide what records should be preserved for permanent record purposes. I hope that he is ruthless in cutting out surpluses, because many documents are classified that I certainly would not classify. The suggestion that they should be preserved is anathema to me.
The Keeper's third function is to decide on public access to records. By putting that as the third function, I do not underestimate its importance. I put it third because unless we give full force to the first two functions we can forget about public access, because if the records are not preserved it will not be worth the public having access to them. Those functions and duties are inherent in the Public Records Act 1958. They inevit- 1054 ably dictate the options open to the Keeper in deciding on staff reductions. I hope that he will regard the importance of his functions as being in that order.
The Keeper reluctantly reached the conclusion that if sufficient reductions in staff were to be made, consistent with the statutory obligations, there was no alternative to closing the Chancery Lane office.
The Keeper's proposal has one obvious advantage. Although I shall not close my eyes to the disadvantages, I hope that everyone will open his eyes to the positive advantages. It would eliminate the duplication of services by centralising them at Kew, where there is adequate accommodation for the Chancery Lane records. That is a plus.
That brings me naturally to the first of the objections to the closure of the Chancery Lane office—namely, that it is said that the move to Kew would cause inconvenience to readers. I do not shrink from that, and it must be accepted that some readers will find the journey to Kew inconvenient. That argument was decided when the new public records building at Kew was opened in 1977. There were protests at the time, which I understand, but it will be generally agreed that the Kew project has been a success.
All of us ought to give credit where credit is due. It is a credit to the Public Record Office staff that Kew has been such a success. Readers have adjusted happily to it, and the price of moving from central London is regarded by many people as something quite worth paying.
Of course, keeping the Chancery Lane rooms open has been an added convenience for some. It follows that their closure would be of inconvenience to those to whom the opening was a continued convenience. However, I should like to spend a few minutes putting that into perspective. I know that the hon. Member is aware of the figures, because he has taken an interest in the matter, but it is important that the public, and especially those who are complaining so bitterly—much more bitterly than the hon. Gentleman, who puts his arguments in a very balanced way—should know and bear in mind at least the following figures.
1055 Of all the visits paid to the Public Record Office for the purpose of looking at documents, only about 27 per cent. are to Chancery Lane; 43 per cent. are to Kew, and the rest are to Portugal Street, which is not affected by the proposal. It follows that only about 25 per cent. of the visits to the Public Record Office would be affected in any way by the proposal.
Next, it is to be observed—I think that this is entirely overlooked by too many people—that for some of those making those 25 per cent. of visits it would be a positive advantage. For instance, those who at present wish to see some documents at Kew and some at Chancery Lane, and for that purpose have to make two journeys, would then to have to make only one. There are also some who would prefer to go to Kew but have to go to Chancery Lane at present, because that is the only place where they can see a particular document. That is the positive side.
Of course, on the other side that leaves those who want to see only documents kept at Chancery Lane and find it more convenient to go to Chancery Lane. In a perfect world—let me agree with the hon. Gentleman—I should like to see them accommodated. I hope that in due course, when things get better, we can provide an even better service, but I hope that everyone will appreciate that it is only the convenience of those persons that would suffer—that is to say, those who want to see only documents that are at Chancery Lane. The hon. Gentleman will know what other people may not know—that even those people can get photostat copies at a cost that is in most cases less than the fare to get to Chancery Lane to look at them.
I know that that is only one side of the coin. There are other people who want to browse through documents—who do not know what documents they want until they have browsed through them. I should like to accommodate them, too, because we want to encourage people to look at the records of our national heritage. A very proud heritage it is. The more people who look at it, both to dis- 1056 cover the bad things and the good things about it, the better.
One is reduced to the category of people who would be really inconvenienced—those who want to browse through a file rather than have a copy of a particular document and for whom it is much more convenient to go to Chancery Lane than to go to Kew. I do not shrink from accepting that from their point of view what is proposed would mean that it would be that much more difficult and that much more expensive.
I am told by the Keeper—and I have not the least doubt about it—that he and his staff will do their utmost to mitigate those difficulties and that if anyone wishes to look at a document, instead of going to Kew and then waiting for it to come from Chancery Lane to Kew, if he would care to telephone beforehand and say "I should like to look at such-and-such a document", it will very likely be there at the moment at which he wants it. The Department is very experienced in bringing documents from other places.
I hope that the hon. Gentleman will feel that what I have said in this limited time has been enough to show that the Establishment shares his concern. I assure him that we do. We want to lessen the disadvantages as much as we can. I hope also that the hon. Gentleman, who knows a great deal about the matter, will feel that what I have had the opportunity to say, because of his persistence, will have helped to put the matter into better perspective. I have not sought to gloss over the matter; I have sought to accept the difficulties and to put them in their right perspective.
I hope that the hon. Gentleman and the public will accept that these matters must be balanced one against the other and that in his proposals the Keeper has made a very skilful and commendable attempt to balance the necessity to maintain to the full the first and second of his basic duties with the minimum of lessening of his ability to carry out the third of those duties.
I commend the efforts made by the Public Record Office to perform all those duties within the financial limitations.