Public Records

HL Deb 26 May 1982 vol 430 cc1224-49

7.32 p.m.

Lord Teviot rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will elaborate on their response (Cmnd. 8531) to the Report on Modern Public Records (Selection and Access) (Wilson Report) (Cmnd. 8204).

The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. First and foremost I must warmly thank all noble Lords who have been kind enough to put their names down to speak, and especially my noble and learned friend, who has been kind enough to say he will reply. Equally, one is very privileged by the fact that one has such a distinguished maiden speaker who has chosen this debate in which to make his first speech here.

The last time we discussed the subject of public records in a mini-debate was in 1977. I initiated that in order to give your Lordships an opportunity to discuss records policy as it was then, nearly 25 years after the Grigg Commission had reported, which report was followed by the Public Records Act 1958, introducing the 50-year rule, and later the 1967 Act, which brought in the 30-year rule. That debate was well received, and was followed by a good response in the press and from the general public. Later it was established, after various meetings and discussions, that there needed to be a further look, and in 1978 the then noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack, who we are delighted to see on the Front Bench opposite today, ordered that the Wilson Committee be set up.

This three-member committee produced a most comprehensive and impressive report of no fewer than 256 pages, and made no fewer than 61 main recommendations. This report was laid before Parliament in March 1981—a no mean feat. Finally, in March of this year the Government presented their White Paper on the report. I do wish that I could welcome this document with alacrity and praise, but with due deference to its authors there is no way that I can. To go further, I am afraid I must express my extreme disappointment. It is a great shame that so little of substance has been accepted. Many of the proposals were an amplification of the original Grigg Committee's report, which has done so much. I was pleased that at least some of the Wilson Committee's recommendations were accepted. However, for the rest of my speech I shall refer to some of the recommendations that have fallen by the wayside. For the sake of convenience I shall follow the line of the White Paper, which, incidentally, does not follow the same path as the report, for various reasons.

However, be that as it may, undeterred I shall plunge into detail, starting with the very important area of selection. Here one begins by saying that the Wilson Committee and the Government agree that there is a need for better selection of records and not necessarily more records to be selected. But I am afraid that this is where the similarity of views ends. For instance, in paragraph 10 the White Paper states: The report conveys the general impression that there has been substantial destruction of valuable material, although little specific evidence is adduced to support this view".

I find this paragraph somewhat unfairly dismissive, as the authors of this report naturally did not give specific evidence as they rightly thought this would have been tantamount to witch-hunting and unproductive, and in turn the authors of the White Paper did not specifically ask them to produce the evidence in confidence. Again, the equation of there being over 40 miles of records transferred since 1954 is excellent, but not meaningful by itself. It is in fact misleading in its application to the number of readers at the Public Records Office, which has nearly quadrupled from 25,000 to 99,000 in 1981. This tremendous increase does not follow from the fact that the extra 40 miles are all being read, but is in fact largely due, I suspect, to the explosion of interest (in which I include myself) in genealogy. Incidentally, when considering cuts in Government spending I hope the Government will bear in mind this vast increase in the work of the Public Records Office.

The Wilson Committee took a huge amount of evidence from no fewer than 61 departments; viz., Appendix 2, pages 179 to 221. In contrast, the Government examined only four unnamed departments, from which they concluded that, rather than excessive destruction, in fact too much had been kept. Here I must say that the point seems to have been missed, for as I have already said it is not the amount that is being kept, it is what is being selected for preservation.

The committee chose as a method of improving selection to suggest the setting up of sector panels, which suggestion has been turned down flat. Those sector panels are, as the White Paper rightly says, a central theme of the committee's report. I now quote from paragraph 22 of the White Paper, which is, frankly, a horror; that is, The Government believe that the present arrangements have not been shown to be sufficiently effective"—

Lord Elwyn-Jones

My Lords, will the noble Lord forgive me? I am having great difficulty in hearing him because he is in front of a microphone. Perhaps he would be kind enough to move across to the side of it.

Lord Teviot

I apologise to your Lordships, and I apologise also to the Official Reporter and to the gentleman of the press. I am very grateful to the noble and learned Lord for drawing my attention to that. I was quoting from paragraph 22 of the White Paper, where it says: The Government believe that the present arrangements have not been shown to be sufficiently defective to justify the establishment of seven new sector panels or committees or the provision of staff to service them". What the Government are saying is that they acknowledge the fact that present arrangements are not satisfactory, on the one hand, but, on the other, they propose to do nothing about it.

The obvious question that arises out of this is: "How bad have things got to be before they do anything about it?" Furthermore, how will they know? The Government turned down sector panels purely on doctrinal grounds, many of which I agree with, and as their setting up would increase the size of the Civil Service, without considering their merits at all. In fact, there is one such body (which is known as the Ministry of Defence's historical panel) which the committee suggest as a model for all sector panels. The members consist of three academic experts and the records administration officer at the Public Record Office, under departmental chairmanship—which is the Under-Secretary. Their purpose is to advise the departmental record officer and his staff on the problems involved in selecting records for preservation. They only happen to meet once a year. Perhaps they could meet twice a year as they used to. Three of its members are in the Civil Service, anyway. How, then, pray, could three academics meeting so rarely be said to be increasing the size of the Civil Service or non-departmental public bodies? We are hardly talking about quangos. Therefore, one would like the Government to explore this area again.

I now move on to access, on which the White Paper is less dismissive and more considerate to the recommendations of the committee. The Government amended the criteria under which records have been closed for more than 30 years. It is also proposed to give more information about records withheld under Section 3(4) of the Public Records Act 1958. I fear that this may not go all the way to overcome the criticism of some historians. Here, I must say how sorry I am that my noble friend Lord Bethell is unable to be with us today. He is in Brussels on parliamentary business, and has given me a pertinent missive. Perhaps this may be the time for me to read that missive. He and I have dealt with public records matters for some years, usually dealing with rather different issues, although we usually agree.

My noble friend in his missive has asked me to say that he too welcomes the liberalising decisions of the White Paper, especially the small but significant changes in the long-closure guidelines where the criterion is changed from one of "embarrassment" to living persons or their descendants to one of "danger". He points out, however, that the White Paper proposes no alteration to the law entitling a Government department to retain any document whatsoever in its own files beyond the 30-year limit without satisfying any system of guidelines.

This surely is the main flaw in the otherwise moderately liberal Public Record Acts. A Government department, in practice, is able to retain any document that it wishes and with the best will in the world the noble and learned Lord will not have the time or the patience to examine retained documents to check whether a department's proposals are reasonable. He will I am afraid, in future as in the past, merely accept a department's contention that such documents are "sensitive" and rubberstamp their request to be allowed to retain them.

Nor is there any serious provision in the White Paper to modify the notorious "Gardiner edict" of 1967, by which the noble and learned Lord's predecessor gave blanket permission for all intelligence-related documents to be retained in their departments irrespective of whether or not their disclosure was capable of harming the national interest. Such documents are not even submitted to the Lord Chancellor and there is no check whatsoever on whether departments are retaining papers which are genuinely sensitive or whether they are misusing this provision to retain papers which are simply embarrassing to Ministers or officials of the day.

My noble friend Lord Bethell therefore feels that, even after the liberalising moves contained in the White Paper are put into effect, our policy on public records will be more restrictive than it should or need be. At at time when many democratic countries —most recently, Canada—are moving towards more open government and greater access for the citizen to the mechanism of decision making, our own British Government, so enlightened in every other area of reform and with one of the most enlightened Lord Chancellors in recent memory, are showing themselves depressingly unforthcoming. That is all I want to say concerning my noble friend Lord Bethell. I should have preferred this debate on a day which suited him, but, through the usual channels, I was advised that this was the only time for a debate such as this to come on at a reasonable hour. But, in any case, my noble friend's views have been heard.

While on the subject of access—and here I return to my own speech—I must take slight issue with paragraphs 38 to 40 which deal with the role of the advisory council on this matter. The Wilson Committee sought to involve the council more as an independent source to advise on questions related to extended closure and the retention of records by departments. In effect, they wished for a select committee of the council to be set up, consisting of Privy Counsellors and others qualified to question material of the highest sensitivity. The Government considered this suggestion carefully but still opposed it as they felt that it was not right for even highly eminent members to look at these papers.

I must say that I find this very difficult to understand as, on the council, we have the noble Lord, Lord Trend—and he regrets that he is unable to be here because of pressing college business at Oxford—who, as your Lordships will know, was for many years Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office. Can there be a more confidential post than that? In addition, the advisory council boasts of a former Permanent Secretary of the Lord Chancellor's Department and two learned judges, one being the Master of the Rolls. The White Paper suggests that Lord Trend's successors as Secretary to the Cabinet may be the arbiter; but, surely, they will always be too busy. Recently my right honourable friend the Solicitor General said that my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor would welcome further advice on this matter. I should like to express regret that the recommendation of the Wilson Committee was turned down and I should like the Government to reconsider.

Briefly, I should also like to mention the position of the Master of the Rolls as statutory chairman of the advisory council. The council has since expressed their dismay that this may be changed. I, too, am very firmly concerned with this not only through our great personal admiration and my personal affection for the present incumbent, and not necessarily only following tradition. We all feel that to have so distinguished a person as he who holds the office of Master of the Rolls is of great benefit. Moreover, he is seen to be impartial.

There are many other aspects of the committee's report and the White Paper to which I would like to refer in detail but there is little time. For example, machine-readable records are generally welcomed. On the matter of National Health records little has been achieved, and this I am afraid has been unsatisfactory. The Wilson Committee received some excellent submissions and prepared considered recommendations. I shall not go into this in detail as it is a very specialised and intricate subject and should be dealt with only after taking careful soundings with academic and clinical scientists, especially the epidemiologists and the geneticists.

There is one very important matter to which I should like to draw your Lordships' attention. It is paragraph 62 of the White Paper which mentions the opening hours of the Public Record Office. Immediately I switch back to paragraph 4, where the Government accept their obligation to ensure that the Public Record Office is an invaluable national asset and is to be safeguarded. In fact, this is open only to those who can get there between 9.30 am and 5 pm between Monday and Friday. There are two reasons for dismissing this. One is cost—very important—and the other is staffing. It is easy to hide behind the coattails of the staff council or trade unions; but have these bodies been consulted and if so what are the results?

One happy note which is strictly not in the terms of this Unstarred Question is this. On the feasibility study which my noble and learned friend kindly set up about the building in Chancery Lane, as it goes, one is pleased with the statement made by the Solicitor-General that the Chancery Lane section will be left open and the office will not be re-united at Kew for the moment. This will please many people. I know that my noble and learned friend and also the Master of the Rolls have had a great number of letters and at the moment it is a very pleasant outcome. I think I must say that the splendid Sir James Pennythorne building in Chancery Lane opposite the Law Society needs quite a lot of renovation and one hopes that that will take place.

Finally, I should like to mention that one is very grateful to the honourable Member, Mr. Christopher Price, for raising the matter in the House of Commons because it is a great many years since the House of Commons have found time to raise the subject. A subject of this kind might be described as ephemeral, but one is delighted and it has certainly paved the way for this debate.

Also, one must thank very much Sir Duncan Wilson's committee for their interest and enthusiasm—in particular Professor Margaret Gowing, who was originally a member of the Grigg Committee, and also has given valuable service on the Wilson Committee. Who knows, she may well be on the next one in 25 years time. She is still quite young. Finally, it is unlikely that the subject of public records will be raised again for some time, which makes me even more concerned that the White Paper has, I am afraid, been so negative. Such a great opportunity has been missed for improving what is acknowledged worldwide as one of the country's greatest heritages.

7.51 p.m.

Lord Elwyn-Jones

My Lords, the House will be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Teviot. I apologise for having to ask him to move from his place. But as he was inaudible and it was important that we should hear what he had to say—knowing his expertise and concern in this matter—I hope by now that he has forgiven me.

The noble Lord has plugged away—if I may so put it —on this subject for many years. When I was occupying the place which my noble and learned predecessor and successor now occupies, I had the benefit of the advantage of his criticism. What is excellent is that his Question has attracted to the list of speakers several most distinguished historians, and additionally the noble Lord, Lord Bancroft, whose experience and distinguished career as head of the Home Civil Service, has enabled him to speak with great authority on the subject-matter of our discussion this evening. We look forward very much to hearing his maiden speech.

The noble Lord, Lord Teviot, opened a debate in this matter, as I well remember, in 1977. At that time there was certainly a good deal of dissatisfaction about the records position which, if I may say so, I shared myself. That anxiety was also expressed by the Advisory Council. Out of the general feeling that the matter ought to be investigated the inquiry was set up in 1978, and I had the privilege of attracting to the committee a most distinguished trio, if I may say so. I am sure that we are all extremely grateful to them for their massive and searching inquiry, and for their challenging report.

I had the satisfaction in 1967 of dealing as Attorney-General in the Commons with the Public Records Act which reduced from 50 years to 30 years the period for which public records—subject to certain exceptions—were closed. So, I have at least this degree of mitigation which I call in aid for any fault in subsequent events.

As the Wilson Report put it, while the 1967 Act satisfied the historians' and the public's attitude to some extent, it also stimulated a demand for more. More and more records were indeed churned out of the governmental machine. As the Public Record Office stated way back in 1962, there are 3 million persons employed in the Civil Service and by other bodies subject to the Public Records Act 1958, and in the aggregate they produce each year records which would occupy 100 miles of shelving. Experience suggests that the Public Record Office should expect to receive each year, for permanent preservation, about one mile of records. The problem is how to reduce the 100 miles to one mile of material worth keeping. That is indeed a serious problem. One of the anxieties of the Wilson Committee in applying that proportion of 1 to 100 across the board is that perhaps too much is lost. It is clear that we face a problem of disposing of unnecessary material not worth preserving, and being careful to maintain what is needed as part of our national heritage.

The records and record keeping—and access to records—are, I believe, essential not only for scholarly research. The famous dictum of Lord Acton will be known to us all: To keep one's archives barred against historians is tantamount to leaving one's history to one's enemies". They are also important for Government purposes, administrative purposes and even policy evaluation and indeed, as we have recently found, for maintaining our rights in the international field.

I greatly hope that any historical records relating to the history of the Falkland Islands position, for instance, have survived the last century and a half, and are in good order. I was pleased, when it fell to me to deal with the Gibraltar question, to find that the documentation with regard to that was in a very good state indeed. This enabled me to produce a somewhat confident report which I will not trouble your Lordships with now.

The value of records calls for a proper priority in dealing with them which I fear has not always been accorded to them. In the past it has indeed been something of a rather chancy business from time to time. It is disturbing to read in the Wilson Report that to some extent it still is. The report concedes that there have been some good results following the Grigg Report, particularly the clearance of much of the backlog of records and steady flow of material to the public Records Office, where of course it is open to the public. But the conclusion of the report—and we are all anxious to hear the views of the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor on this—is highly critical, and is in terms that in important respects the system has been implemented neither in the spirit nor in the letter, and the Committee have made 61 recommendations to cope with the situation, many of which the Government in the White Paper have indicated that they accept.

While concluding that the system of first and second reviews by departments, where of course the main responsibility in the whole of this field lies, which is proposed in the Grigg Report is basically sound, the report says that there is weakness in its implementation. It indeed finds that the record of management is patently ineffective in many departments, and states that there has been substantial destruction of valuable material. We shall be interested to learn from the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor a little more about that because, with respect, the allegation of destruction of documentation has been dealt with almost casually and dismissively in the White Paper.

The White Paper has been subjected to considerable criticism tonight and we shall await with interest the answers of the noble and learned Lord to the specific matters that have been raised. It favours a continuation of the present distribution of responsibility for public records among the Public Record Office, the Lord Chancellor's Office and the Advisory Council on Public Records, as provided in the 1958 Act. It emphasises, as I think clearly must be the case, that responsibility for the management and review of records should remain firmly placed with the departments. There is no escaping from that; that is the crucial area in this whole field.

The Government reject the report's view that by means of sector panels formal channels of communication should be opened between researchers and those involved in the process of selection of documents. I understand that the ground for rejection of this proposal is largely because of lack of resources. Then, as to whether this is an ideological or a practical ground, I suspect that the noble and learned Lord will say the latter, because it is thought it would run counter to the Government's policy of reducing the size of the public service.

As far as cost is concerned, there is not a great deal of enlightenment in the White Paper about that and it would be interesting, if the figures are readily available, to know whether it is now possible to estimate how much expenditure is involved in this field of public records. Then one will be disposed to ask: would what was proposed in the report to be too high a price to pay for the greater participation of researchers in the process of selection for the permanent keeping of documents.

On access to the public records, the White Paper states that the Government's approach has been based on the presumption that as much material as possible which may be of interest to future historians should be made available to the public. That was, I thought, the policy of the previous Administration, and I hope it may be thought—though obviously it is not—that we did our best to maintain it. The White Paper adds the caveat that: this aim of maximum disclosure has to be balanced against the consideration that some Government records, particularly those concerned with security and individual safety, privacy and confidentiality, must remain unavailable for public inspection for longer periods than the normal run of public records". I venture to suspect that the House will readily understand that Parliament, the Advisory Council and the press must, while recognising the importance of maintaining that caveat, be vigilant to see that the balance is not tilted in such a way that informed discussion on matters of public concern becomes impossible because access to the relevant documentation is shut out.

On access, with respect, I welcome the proposal, which the White Paper accepts, that the closure of documents on the previous ground set out by my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner of "distress or embarrassment" to living persons or their descendants as a ground for withholding documentation, should be changed to "distress or danger". Also, the agreement that there should be greater time limits on blanket approval to closure of groups or categories of records.

One major departure—I shall finish on this point—of the White Paper from the report's proposals is in its rejection of the proposal that the Advisory Council's role in advising on questions of extended closure should be extended. It proposes that a sub-committee of the council should be formed, comprising privy councillors and others qualified to see material of the highest sensitivity, which would be an independent source of advice to the Lord Chancellor on, for example, protests or appeals about withheld records. I myself have an open mind about this. We do, after all, entrust the most intimate secrets to privy councillors and use them to deal with sensitive matters. On the other hand, premature release of sensitive public records could cause potential damage, and perhaps it is not surprising that a Government would be reluctant to pass the responsibility for decisions on disclosure of sensitive security documents to an outside body.

I note that the White Paper accepts that the present arrangements for providing the Lord Chancellor with advice on the discharge of his statutory powers in relation to access to records are not wholly satisfactory, since both he and the Public Record Office are obliged, as is the case, to rely heavily on the advice of the Government department concerned. I confess I found this to be so in my experience and, frankly, one had to take most things on trust from the department whose records were concerned and whose recommendations the Lord Chancellor was asked to approve. Pressure of work on the Lord Chancellor's staff, and indeed on the Lord Chancellor himself, is heavy and an examination and appraisal of the individual documents themselves was generally out of the question.

The White Paper, while rejecting the proposal that a sub-committee of the Advisory Council should advise the Lord Chancellor on extended closure and the retention of records by a department, suggests instead that the Secretary of the Cabinet should be asked to look into the matter and advise the Lord Chancellor. I would have thought that, next to the Lord Chancellor, the Cabinet Secretary must be one of the busiest men in the machinery of government, and I cannot quite see how he would be able, purely in terms of the pressure of time, commitments and other responsibilities, to be of very great assistance in this field, valuable though his help will be, of course. Indeed he may have enough on his hands already in advising on ministerial memoirs!

8.7 p.m.

Lord Bancroft

My Lords, I hope that I am audible: if I am not, perhaps the noble Lord will tell me. I am indeed extremely grateful to the noble Lord for giving us the opportunity to discuss this highly unglamorous but highly important subject which is so often, as he pointed out, neglected by the legislature. It is a great privilege to follow the former Lord Chancellor; and although flattery never does anyone any good I do not intend to flatter anyone but to tell the truth—and truth occasionally does one some good. I never dreamt that I would be making my maiden speech in this House with this glittering, though not very long, galaxy of fellow speakers. I can assure your Lordships that I shall be extremely brief.

In beginning, I should like to ask for the indulgence which I am told this House shows to maiden speakers. I am sure I will commit every solecism and infelicity known to your Lordships, because, after all, I have spent my time, on the whole, drafting speeches for others to read rather than making them myself. I should also like to declare an interest, since I had a very small part in advising on the setting up of the Wilson Committee, and I should like to echo the tributes that have been paid to Sir Duncan, Professor Gowing, Sir Paul Osmond and the secretariat for the immensely thorough work which they put into producing the report.

I think that it is a balanced and sensitive report. I say that because, in my experience, the keeping of public records—selection, access and all the rest of the matters which are covered in the report—is something on which it will never be possible to reach universal agreement. This is, no doubt, a pessimistic view but is one that I feel very profoundly, because there is a constant tug between, putting it crudely, timidity on the part of successive Governments and their advisers, and revolution on the part of some academics, some archivists and some journalists. Both have respectable intellectual backing for their views, but there are also behind all that, on both sides, rather more disreputable vested interests. I think that the argument will go on endlessly and a very good thing, too. Let it be aired as publicly and as often as possible. Speaking from the safety of the Cross-Benches, I think that Governments could, on occasion, he more revolutionary or more robust and ought to take a few more risks and so on. I am very conscious of the fact that I have been one of their advisers over many years, so I fully accept that, if blame there is, it does not fall solely on successive administrations; it falls also on their advisers.

Noble Lords will be glad to know that I have five very brief points to make. First, as I have already said, I welcome the Wilson Report. I wish that I could welcome as wholeheartedly the Government's response, but I welcome it up to a point. I hope that I am not being controversial, because I am told that one must not he controversial. Secondly, I entirely agree that the staff of departmental records sections should be scrutinised frequently—not over-frequently—from the point of view of quality and grading. As I understand from the report, in many departments matters are now at a pretty high standard, but there are some laggards and one knows of one or two departments which, in the past, have, putting it crudely, used this area of their activities as a dumping ground.

Thirdly, I, on the whole, am pleased that the notion of sector panels has been turned down, but with a proviso to which I shall come in a moment. I believe that the closer connection between, say, the academic world and those involved in departmental records work, can be achieved just as effectively, and I suspect more economically, by an increased emphasis on informal ad hoc contacts. But my proviso is that this needs to be kept under very close review, because I can remember in 1970 immense efforts being put into opening up archives well before the expiry of the 30-year period to what I think were called bona fide researchers, and we got Privy Council blessing for it.

The report says—and I think it is the only cruel sentence that I have spotted in it—that, Academics have taken very little advantage of this facility. We find this a sad reflection on their activity in this fields". I think that that is a bit cruel, because there are faults on both sides. I speak as one who is on the other side, as it were, and I think it is a bit of a reflection on the academics. But the sceptics could go on to say that, in some ways, it bears out Mark Twain's splendid pair of sentences: Adam was but human. This explains it all. He didn't want the apple for the apple's sake. He wanted it only because it was forbidden". Fourthly, I am glad that the balance of the membership of the advisory council, of which we have at least one member here, and which has done much valuable work, has been reviewed. Fifthly and finally, I am sure, like the Wilson Committee, that new technology will have a very big role to play in the foreseeable future. More needs to be done. Quite a lot, I believe, and as the report demonstrates, is being done. If it entails a modest extra capital investment, I hope that this will be looked on kindly. I hope, too, that the London end of the PRO's activities, in terms of physical accommodation, will be looked at kindly as part of the process of preserving—and I quote the report— one of the single richest archives in the world and a most precious part of the national heritage". I see that my notes conclude with three words "Go to Kew". That being translated does not mean go there to see the lilacs, because they are finished, anyway. But those of your Lordships who have not been to the PRO in Kew—and I am sure that you all have—should please go, because they have achieved a great deal, they have a good retrieval, storage process, a good delivery process, and a very devoted staff, and I hope that when noble Lords criticise the Government's response to the report, as they no doubt will, they will bear in mind the fact that the staff, both at the Kew end and at the London end, are doing a very remarkable job.

8.18 p.m.

Lord Beloff

My Lords, it is a great privilege to be the first person to congratulate this maiden speaker on his first appearance in a speaking role and to express the hope that, freed from the restraints on controversy which are acceptable for a maiden speaker, he will frequently enlighten us from his own vast experience in government. He has chosen, perhaps characteristically, a debate in which he was bound to hear some criticism of the profession which he so lately adorned, because we must imagine that the White Paper which is the subject of our debate this evening is the product of anonymous public servants, since I hardly believe that a document of this quality could be the product of the hand of the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, or even have been revised by so distinguished a scholar.

We are grateful to my noble friend Lord Teviot, too, for enabling us to discuss this document. I should like to begin my own remarks by saying that, whereas in this House it is customary to declare an interest, I am proposing to speak against my own interest, because I firmly believe that the task of the historian is immeasurably lightened by the greatest possible destruction of documents and the least possible access to those which survive. Indeed, there are States in the world which are in the business of creating histories on the profound foundation that they have no written documents.

I shall try to speak, because I think I should, on behalf of historians who are important consumers of the product which the records provide. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Dacre of Glanton, who is more of a practising historian than I, will also wish to speak on this subject. As the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, pointed out to your Lordships, the Committee was extraordinarily distinguished. It included a scholarly ex-ambassador of wide experience, a home civil servant with an unusual breadth of experience and an historian who, straddling the worlds of the natural sciences and humanities, commands the confidence of those interested both in history and in the development of science and technology which, as the noble Lord, Lord Bancroft, pointed out, is going to have its own impact on this problem.

As the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, pointed out, this distinguished committee interviewed the representatives of some 61 public bodies and a great many private scholars—representatives of learned societies and so forth—and produced a report which, as the noble Lord, Lord Bancroft, said, is a profoundly important, interesting and valuable document upon which all discussion of this subject is likely to rest for some years to come. In reply—look now on this picture, now on this—we have a document which shows very little serious understanding of the importance of records, not merely for those who seek, for scholarly purposes or purposes of curiosity, to study the past but, as the noble and learned Lord the ex-Lord Chancellor reminded us, records which are of crucial importance to the framing of Governmental policy, now and in the future.

It is very difficult to see that the Government appreciated the real anxieties of the committee, documented and based upon a year and a half's hard work, as to the inadequacies which they found in the current handling of records. The replies seem to be dismissive to an extent which is really surprising. Both the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, and the noble and learned Lord the ex-Lord Chancellor referred to 61 recommendations. In fact, since some of the recommendations are multiple, there are 71 recommendations —of which 43 were accepted, 20 were not accepted, seven were noted and one was marked "consider". Had the noble Lord, Lord Bancroft, spoken after me, I should have asked him to enlighten your Lordships on the difference between "not accepted", "noted" and "consider". I am sure that these have some esoteric significance in the corridors of power, but they do not immediately convey anything to my mind except, "The Government do not propose to do anything about it".

In particular, the committee, conscious, as the noble Lord, Lord Bancroft, with his vast experience has confirmed, of the weaknesses of certain departments in carrying out their statutory duties has suggested that the Public Record Office should be a more active body, should have greater powers of intervention where it thinks that the objectives of the Act are not being fully carried out and should have a strengthened staff in order to perform these functions. However, this section of the report—which is a very important section, because the Public Record Office is the heart of the whole operation—is dismissed without serious argument.

A good deal has been said about the advisory council, about the proposed sector panels. Once again one seems to get a mere defensive reaction: "Leave the departments alone; let them be the judges". Running through this White Paper is a belief which I find disturbing in this as in other aspects of Government—a belief that the civil servants who happen to be in charge happen also to know best and, alongside this, some impatience with the wider public who see the national records as something which are important to them both as citizens and in their private capacities.

Even when the Government declare that they accept a recommendation of the Wilson Committee they are very half-hearted—or sometimes they seem to be very half-hearted about it. The problem of going and studying these records—this is no reflection upon the staff at Kew to whom the noble Lord, Lord Bancroft, referred—has been made greater by the decision (now, alas! long in the past) to move the bulk of the modern records to the outer suburbs. We are the only major country which does not keep its national archives close to the heartbeat of Government and of scholarship.

Once they are there, however, clearly there is a much greater problem for visitors from overseas and an even greater problem for scholars in the provinces. We are always told that we should look out for centres of excellence outside London, yet for a scholar outside London it is surely even more important that if he has to pay today's very considerable travelling charges the hours of opening should be as long as possible and that the week should not be a five-day week. Yet the committee, I thought with great modesty—looking at some other countries' treatment of archives (the United States, for instance) they might have gone further—made some very modest suggestions, quite rightly bearing in mind that extra financial resources were unlikely to be forthcoming.

Although in principle the Government accept the idea in the White Paper of better access, they make it subordinate, as the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, has pointed out, not only—and rightly—to financial considerations but also (and this appears to me to be quite unwarrantable) to the personal convenience of staff members. They say: There would need to be negotiations with staff to vary their national conditioned hours of work and at present it is not clear they would readily accept an extension of hours within which they could be required to work". If I repeat the phrase, "nationally conditioned hours of work" and say "Tell that to the marines", I take it that the House will get my meaning. After all, the civil servants in the Public Record Office, like other civil servants, are servants. They are there to fulfil a public need.

It may be that if they took up these posts on the assumption that their hours of work would be restricted, they would not wish to alter them—or their trade unions would not wish to see them altered. But in that case the Government have the possibility of redeploying them to salubrious resorts like Swansea, Glasgow and Newcastle-upon-Tyne where other branches of Government now operate. There are coming, from universities in particular at this moment, a great number of eager graduates well trained in history and other relevant disciplines who would, I am sure, be perfectly happy to take on posts of responsibility in the Public Record Office, even at the expense of not playing golf every Saturday. This does seem to me to be one example of this unwillingness to be a flexible and unwillingness to see that if one chooses to put the Public Record Office in the outer suburbs, then certain consequences ought to follow, if the records are to be taken advantage of as they should be.

8.30 p.m.

Lord Ardwick

My Lords, first I must thank the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, for giving us the opportunity to discuss this question today. Secondly, I must congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bancroft, on his maiden speech. I was most relieved because the noble Lord brings to this House a very special experience. His special experience is totally different from mine. His special experience is Whitehall and mine is Fleet Street. Nevertheless, I found myself relieved when I heard his speech and realised how much I agreed with him. I agreed even more with the speech that the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, has just made.

There are two contrary pressures on the Government today. One is for wholesale revelation of information. The other is to conceal everything which an individual would wish not to be revealed about himself. The Wilson Report on Public Records touches both these problems. I am one of those who believe that secrecy—excessive and unnecessary secrecy—is one of the curses of British life. It certainly is for journalists. Journalists spend many hours trying to get information which a democracy should gladly give to its citizens but which is concealed by an over-zealous bureaucracy. The result of such frustration is that today some of my colleagues think that everything should be revealed—from debates inside the jury room to those in the Cabinet itself. I do not belong to that extreme faction, but I do look forward to the day when the Official Secrets Act is at last reformed and when we have a Freedom of Information Act.

In the meantime, some of the Government proposals for dealing with the Wilson Report are mildly helpful to those who try to find out what went on and not just what goes on. But the Government's White Paper is half-hearted, over-cautious, and too much concerned with saving appearances. All that the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, said about the poverty of this White Paper compared with the richness of the report, I agree with wholeheartedly. Of course, we must recognise that the Public Record Office does not exist primarily to provide material for social researchers or to furnish journalists with evidence of recent political ineptitude. Its main job is to provide for the historian and to keep for ever what posterity may need. I think that a nation is always enriched by knowing its true history. It is both a stimulus to emulate the good things it has done in the past and a warning against repeating ill-judged decisions and inglorious episodes.

The danger a sophisticated public fears today is not simply destroying records of error and miscalculation as a political cover-up. The danger that historians fear is of careless and ignorant destruction of historically important material. Sometimes both these fears and suspicions are groundless because actions which turn out to be disastrous were never committed in full to paper. When the inquiry is conducted into the events preceding the Falklands invasion, there may be gaps in the story occasioned by mere accident or sheer prudence. The White Paper, I am glad to say, comments that party political sensitivity is not a good reason for keeping a file closed.

We are fortunate in this country to have a Public Record Office which is a meticulous custodian. It is right that it should come within the ambit of the Lord Chancellor, who is a step away from the arena of party conflict. But operative responsibility for preserving the records lies with departmental record officers. We are dependent upon the skill, the integrity, and the proper methodology of their staffs. They can make mistakes. I believe that the selection and training of staff is most important—both of experienced people, as the report suggests, and of young historians.

The danger with every record department in whatever kind of organisation is that it is a useful dumping ground for members of the staff who have found the pace of ordinary life a little too fast for them, and these people may not be nature's archivists. Yet the departments are influenced in what they keep, and how they should keep it, by the PRO. The keeper actually has the statutory responsibility to supervise departmental arrangements and to transfer to the Public Record Office those things which he judges ought to be permanently preserved. The recommendations of the Wilson Committee imply that the PRO, the keeper, should now be more assertive and provide more written guidance to departmental officers, and help to educate staff by seminars and conferences. The PRO should, I suppose, discourage both departmental reticence and the retention of feeble items which are going to clutter up the files of the department if not the Public Record Office itself. A demand is made for a fresh initiative by the PRO so that the Lord Chancellor can be assured that records which can be opened without danger to national security or personal privacy are actually made available to public inspection.

The Government agree that there is scope for greater use of the power to open records before the expiry of 30 years. But they look with a cold eye upon the PRO becoming more assertive, partly because they question the wisdom of such a course and partly because a stronger role would require more resources, which would mean spending a little more money to employ a few more people. The Government want to employ fewer civil servants and to spend less money. It is more concerned with saving a few pounds than it is with achieving excellence. Even as it is, the committee find that there is a slight continuing shortfall in resources —mainly in manpower. Wherever there is a proposal in the Wilson Report that will cost a little money the Government say, "Not accepted".

There are, of course, some good things in the White Paper. The Government support the recommendation that application for the extended closure of records should be looked at more carefully and that much more information should be publicly available about those records not opened after 30 years. I am glad too that the Government accept that coherent and consistent information should be available to readers at the PRO, about the arrangements for inspection, and also about the various ways in which the normal access at 30 years can be varied.

I even have some sympathy with the Government's rejection of formal channels between researchers and selectors of records. Experts are not an infallible guide. Often they would like everything that pertains to their subject to be retained and may be indifferent to the needs of researchers in other subjects. I would have thought, as the noble Lord, Lord Bancroft, suggested that informal consultations would be useful, and so would joint seminars. There is a case too against giving privileged access to accredited researchers and leaving such privilege to the discretion of the department.

What is difficult to accept, however, is the decision that a small sub-committee of Privy Councillors on the advisory committee should not he an independent source of advice to the Lord Chancellor when he receives appeals against withheld records. They could not judge, it is argued, because judgments require an intimate knowledge of current policies which they would not have. I do not find that very convincing, and I do hope that when the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor answers us he will expand on the White Paper and say why this most important suggestion has been turned down. The idea that the Secretary of the Cabinet should be there as an independent adviser is substituted. I have never thought that the people who occupy the position of Secretary of the Cabinet are frustrated publicists, publicists manqué, not since Tom Jones' day anyway.

8.42 p.m.

Lord Dacre of Glanton

My Lords, I would like to speak, briefly, not only for myself, as an historian, but also on behalf of other historians who have been in touch with me and who are concerned by what seem to them the inadequacies of this White Paper. I need not emphasise the dependence of historians, all kinds of historians, on the public records. And not only historians. Those records are not merely of academic or conservationist interest, as the White Paper somewhat condescendingly seems to suggest. They are, as historians recognise, vital to ensure continuity of policy-making in the present. We have heard of the amount of paper which annually goes into the Public Record Office, but it is also fetched out of it. Every year, I understand, Government departments recall 23,000 files over 25 years old from the Public Record Office, apart from referring to old files which they have never sent there.

The White Paper is, of course, a reply to the report of the Wilson Committee. That report is in effect an examination of the practical working of the Public Record Act 1958, which in turn is the legislative consecration of the Grigg Report of 1954, the first review there has ever been of the problems created by the great variety, bulk and complexity of 20th century records. As such its arguments and its recommendations obviously deserve to be taken very seriously.

The Grigg Report dealt with two main problems: the problem of the selection of records to be preserved and the problem of access to records when they have been preserved. And it concluded by proposing a system which, in the words of the Wilson Committee, was good in itself, not impracticable, and capable of adaptation to changing needs and changing technology. This system recommended by the Grigg Report was accepted by the Government of the time and embodied in the Act of 1958. And yet 28 years later the Wilson Committee has shown with great weight of detailed evidence that in many crucial respects the system had been implemented neither in the spirit nor in the letter.

How have the Government responded to this report? They have indeed accepted some of the detailed recommendations. However, even here, when one reads the text of the White Paper, the number of firm, unequivocal acceptances turns out to be far fewer than the list in the annex suggests. Some acceptances are important; for example, the commitment to tackle the problem of machine reading of records. But on the two main issues of selection and access the crucial recommendations of the Wilson Report are rejected, and are rejected, I must say, in a somewhat offhand, even sometimes offensively dismissive manner, as if the officials who drafted the paper resented interference with their comfortable procedures.

Of these two issues, selection is even more important than access, for if records are destroyed, if they are not selected and are pulped, access becomes impossible anyway. So I shall confine my remarks to access. The section of the White Paper which deals with this matter is, to say the least, dispiriting. The three very busy members of the Wilson Committee spent months observing the selection system at work. They talked to paper keepers and clerks as well as to Permanent Secretaries. They issued a questionnaire to which 61 departments replied. All this research convinced them that the carefully integrated system proposed by the Grigg Committee had from its early days been eroded by administrative instruction and administrative lethargy, and that, with some honourable exceptions among departments, current arrangements are woefully haphazard.

The Wilson Report devotes 107 paragraphs to questions of selection for preservation, as well as providing an extensive summary of responses to their questionnaire. Yet what do we find in the White Paper?—eight complacently dismissive paragraphs which evade the main points. We are told that the Wilson Report conveys the general impression that there has been a substantial destruction of valuable material but that it produces no specific evidence to support that view; that it is not possible to say whether valuable material is being lost, but that on the basis of an undescribed and very limited test check of one part of the reviewing process, too much rather than too little is being preserved.

I understand that the Wilson Committee did not give the evidence of destruction which they had, for entirely responsible reasons which were communicated to the Permanent Secretary. Did the Government ask for such evidence when the White Paper was being prepared? More importantly, the committee concentrated their criticism on the haphazardness of the system, which could produce simultaneously both over-destruction and over-retention.

The White Paper makes no reference to the reports' careful discussion of what are called particular instance papers; that is, case papers of very great range and often very large bulk. Although computers have made possible the use of the data in such papers on a scale undreamed of 28 years ago, the Grigg Report was remarkably far sighted in its proposals for a special selection system for these papers.

The Wilson Report chronicles the sorry failure to implement these proposals, including the failure to use, as Grigg had recommended, the knowledge of experts. With this in mind the Wilson Report recommended the establishment of sector panels, taking as their example the Ministry of Defence historical panel which already exists, in order to mobilise advice from both Government sources and outside researches. These panels were judged crucial if departmental archives were to be handled in an informed manner instead of being left to the whims of perhaps inexpert managers. They could be highly cost-effective and would certainly not be formal quango bodies. Nevertheless, the White Paper dismisses them out of hand and proposes to rely instead on ad hoc links with the academic world.

I note that the noble Lord, Lord Bancroft, whose distinguished maiden speech I listened to with interest, is more sceptical about these sector panels. Well, I can only say that all the academics whom I have consulted think that the ad hoc links with the academic world have singularly failed in the past. Beneath, the past failures of the system lies the failure of the Government structure of responsibility for records. This structure is divided between three inter-dependent authorities: there is the Lord Chancellor, and his department and his advisory council; there is the Public Record Office; and there are the departments which generate records. Here, too, I shall confine myself to one point, the role of the Public Record Office, which is the pivot on which success depends.

It will never be easy to persuade busy departments to give proper priority and supervision to records work and for that reason the Public Records Act, accepting the reasoning of the Grigg Report, gave to the Public Record Office exceptionally strong statutory duties and power for "co-ordinating and supervising" departments' activities. However, it is clear from the Wilson Report that these powers have not been exercised. Therefore, that report recommended that the Public Record Office, on the basis of its existing statutory responsibility, should be more assertive. The White Paper, however, rejects this recommendation. In place of "co-ordination" and "supervision" it prefers the more anodyne terms "general guidance" and "detailed advice". If this view prevails, then the Wilson Report is likely to suffer the fate of the Grigg Report. The unpredictable treatment of departmental archives, the patronising tone of much of the White Paper, and its reluctance to face the massive evidence of the Wilson Report, suggests that this, indeed, is what will happen. It can only be prevented if the Government will reconsider their general attitude and their negative responses, especially on the role of the Public Record Office and on sector panels. Shortage of resources need be no bar, for if the will is there much improvement is possible within existing resources. The report shows that the cost of our public records system, considering its functions, is remarkably low.

As the Wilson Committee said, their report is not revolutionary; it does not ask for new legislation or radical reorganisation; nor does it involve difficult questions of policy. It is, however, of great importance to those who rely upon the documents of the past who are not only historians.

9.52 p.m.

Lord McGregor of Dorris

My Lords, I apologise to the House for my failure to put my name down on the list of speakers, and I undertake to be very brief. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, for the opportunity to discuss a subject of high academic importance, and I am grateful, too, that the subject provided the noble Lord, Lord Bancroft, with the occasion for his weighty and illuminating maiden speech.

I wish to make five comments on the White Paper. First, it seems to notice only the value of public records for their interest for professional and amateur researchers, and as part—to use Lord Bancroft's phrase—of the national heritage. But modern public records of interest to the social sciences are generated by the operations of Government and, before their transfer to the PRO, the Government are their chief user. It seems to me that explicit recognition of Government themselves as the chief user of recent records would help to clarify the proper basis of the assignment of resources to record-keeping within departments, and between departments and the Public Record Office.

Secondly, most rejections of the recommendations of the Wilson Report by the White Paper are on grounds of inability to find extra money. For the present, we must accept this as given, but the report estimated that in 1979–80 £11.7 million was spent on public record activities, and of this amount only £4.4 million went to the Public Record Office and .7.3 million was accounted for by record-keeping within departments for the purposes of current administration. This is an essential part of the organisational work of any administrative body, and it underlines the fact that Government are the main user of records before they go to the PRO, and I think that this role of records is inadequately recognised in the White Paper.

Thirdly, the PRO has too few resources for its statutory work of co-ordinating and supervising the selection and preservation of public records. I do not think that the White Paper recognises that, by definition, the volume of its work must expand year by year, and therefore it is unrealistic to think that the real cost of the PRO can be held constant—unrealistic, that is, unless we are prepared to accept that its service to the community must be allowed to deteriorate year by year.

Fourthly, the White Paper accepts most of the report's recommendations designed to improve, extend or clarify access to public records by non-governmental users, and it contains a number of most welcome promises to investigate such matters as access to statute-barred records—for instance, the records of the Censuses of Production, some of which are well over 50 years old and, indeed, those of the first Census of Production would have been 70 years old now had it not been destroyed.

The White Paper's attitude to the question of extended closure, beyond the normal 30-year rule, on grounds of security or sensitivity, is not particularly helpful. The White Paper holds that decisions on extended closure should rest with the Lord Chancellor alone, seeking advice if necessary from the Secretary to the Cabinet. But the reason advanced, that the Government of the day can alone be in a position to evaluate the sensitivity of public records because they alone have an intimate knowledge of current policies and developments, seems rather puzzling in circumstances in which any particular instance of extended closure must relate to events that occurred more than 30 years previously, and sometimes to events of 50 or 100 years ago. It would seem reasonable that cases of extended closure ought to be subject to review by persons less burdened with responsibility for pressing current problems than busy Ministers and burdened civil servants. The suggestion in the report that those members of the Advisory Council on Public Records who are also privy councillors should act in such matters by means of providing advice to the Lord Chancellor seems sensible, and I hope may be reconsidered.

Finally, the particular instance papers (PIPs) mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Dacre of Glanton, are of particular importance for social scientists and the comments in the White Paper on the National Health Service records I find disturbing, and suggestive of the possibility of mass destruction of data potentially valuable for historical demographers, medical historians and sociologists concerned with the history of social policy. The White Paper explains that the Government took advice from within the service and from doctors in reaching this conclusion. But the administrative detritus of one generation may be the treasure trove of the next, and it takes expert skill in disciplines to envisage what kind of records may yield valuable results in the future. It is for this reason that I should hope, with the noble Lord, Lord Dacre, that the possibility of the sector panels, as suggested in the valuable report of the Wilson Committee, might be reconsidered.

9.1 p.m.

The Lord Chancellor

My Lords, at this late hour I do not know how long I can usefully impose upon the patience of the House. The Question asks me to elaborate on the Government response to the Wilson Report. Clearly, before I do so I must congratulate our maiden speaker, who, with characteristic humility after a most distinguished career in the public service, has chosen to make his parliamentary debut on a Wednesday on an Unstarred Question. The noble Lord, Lord Bancroft, is a most important and valuable addition to the expertise and debating power of this House, and the quality of his speech today leads me to express the hope that I shall have many opportunities of listening to him again, and I hope that he will be able to choose many occasions when a fuller House will have the pleasure of listening to him.

I should also like to thank the other noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, of whom each has been able to make an individual and different contribution based on personal experience—not least, the noble and learned Lord who sits on the Labour Front Bench, who has discharged these responsibilities before me and, therefore, knows them from the inside—and has enabled the debate to be as well informed and, if I may say so, a very well tempered affair.

I shall, of course, try to respond positively to the invitation of my noble friend Lord Teviot to elaborate on the Government's response. But in the nature of things this Question poses me a dilemma. I naturally and normally like to answer debates by replying to the speakers. This, of course, is a good thing because it gives them the assurance that I have actually been listening to what they say, which I should like to begin by assuring all speakers that I have been doing. But in this case I had no notion in advance of what they proposed to put to me, so the nature of the request compels me, in the present instance, to do more or less what is asked; that is, to elaborate rather than to reply. In this case: I'm a creature that moves On predestinate grooves Not a bus, not a bus, but a train".

Lord Teviot

My Lords, if I may come back on the word "elaborate", with due respect to my noble and learned friend, when it came to wording this Question, together with the White Paper, the report and everything else—and I, of course, want him to reply "elaborate" was totally the wrong word that I was advised to mention.

The Lord Chancellor

My Lords, it was not my noble friend's draftmanship of which I was complaining. I not only share the difficulty of the noble and learned Lord on the Labour Front Bench of hearing what my noble friend said, but he said it at such terrific speed that it was quite impossible to take a note of it and he raised so many different subjects that I still remain: a creature that moves On predestinate grooves". However, if it is some comfort to him, I can assure him that his speech will be read in Hansard very carefully, and if it appears that there are particular subjects upon which I should elaborate still further, I shall take the opportunity of replying to him in greater detail. But I am afraid that I must take the general tenor of the debate, rather than allowing myself to be led down the several and very highly detailed paths into which I think he was rather tempted to seduce me.

There is one criticism of the Government's response that I really cannot accept. It has been made publicly. It may be that it is implicit in the Question and I think it was a misunderstanding which underlay most, if not all, of the criticisms which were levelled at it, in a speech, and that is its brevity. My noble friend Lord Beloff is, of course, perfectly correct in detecting the fact that I myself was not the author of it, which he said at the beginning. But that enables me to defend it with a greater sense of confidence.

Brevity is a virtue, and not a vice, and the Government response to what I believe is a definitive report on the subject is a compliment to the authors of the report and not a dismissive criticism. The report is so good that it speaks for itself. We are grateful to its authors and particularly to its chairman, like myself a veteran of the Test Ban Treaty negotiations of 1963, and for whom I have had the greatest admiration ever since. The Government responded only when they desired to qualify or differ from what the report said at very excellent length. In the main, we accept it.

With great respect to my noble friends Lord Dacre and Lord Beloff, I do not think acceptance can be quantified simply by totting up the recommendations at the end—and they seem to have come to very different totals, and totals different from that which I have been given in my brief—as to how many there were altogether, how many were accepted and how many were not.

We accept the report. We accept its philosophy. It is our duty to translate it into practice, and, except where we differ—and we have said where we differ—we will do so. The report will, of course, not be put on the shelf, but it will remain on the shelves long after this immediate response has passed into oblivion by the gradual changes of policy which will be seen over the years. It is in fact by far the most important analysis of the problems affecting the maintenance of public records which has ever been undertaken in this country: more important, although less of a watershed, than the Grigg Report itself.

I must begin by asking one or two philosophical questions about the subject. What is the Public Record Office? What is it for? Why, of all apparently unsuitable people, is the Lord Chancellor responsible for it? He is not an archivist. He is a lawyer and he has other things to do. Why was the Wilson Committee so keen to keep the Lord Chancellor there? And why do Her Majesty's Government accept this recommendation? There are arguments for and against everything in the world. But unless one addresses one's mind to these fundamental questions one cannot effectively understand either the report or criticise the arguments in the Government's response to it. If I may say so, it has been a weakness of the critics that they have not really addressed their minds to this question.

The Public Record Office is, of course, a national archive. It is intended for all time. It goes back to the Norman Conquest. It contains the material for the compilation of Domesday Book. It has a copy, the 1225 copy, of Magna Carta. It contains Shakespeare's will and the first newspaper published in English on the continent of America. It is therefore a national treasure of immense importance. It contains reading rooms and research rooms, but it is not itself a reading room, it is a place where documents can be consulted. It is, of course, not the entire archive of the nation. Some are contained in parish registers, other parts are well known to be contained in the universities and museums. Some are in county records, and many in private collections.

We are going in due course to transfer to it the old Register Office records. But this would require legislation as matters stand; amendments to the Births and Deaths Registration and Marriage Acts. I am constantly transferring suitable items to local archives in various parts of the country as they are more appropriately housed there. It is, therefore, an archive intended for all time, and it is not a matter for day-to-day reference in itself for current events. In the ordinary course documents find their way there after 30 years.

Let me say at once that there must be, in the nature of things having regard to the figures given by the noble and learned Lord on the Labour Front Bench, cases where valuable material has been destroyed, and cases where unnecessary material has been kept. That must be so. I thought, if I may say so, that the speakers who referred with contempt to the figure of 40 miles added to the Public Record Office of shelf space since the Lord Chancellor assumed responsibility as a result of the 1958 Act, were doing the subject less than justice. The heart of the problem is the enormous bulk of material. The noble and learned Lord rightly said, of that 40 miles, that that represents about one document in a 100 the other 99 having disappeared in the course of destruction. That one document is like the epicene poem by Aldous Huxley where poor Noah has survived the deluge alone. It is quite obvious that, with that degree of selectivity to the selection, two conclusions inevitably follow. One is that the selection will not always be right, and the second is that the process of selection is beyond the power of the Lord Chancellor speaking personally, or indeed of the Public Record Office itself. It must be done departmentally or it will not be done at all.

It is of course true that mistakes will be made. I can only say that my own impression is that it has always been the case in this country—it may be one of the great virtues of the Public Record Office—that we have tended to keep too much rather than too little. I was astonished when I first visited Chancery Lane in my first term of office to learn that every writ issued in the King's courts from Edward I onwards had been kept until very recently, when over 100,000 would have to be kept every year in the Queen's Bench Division alone.

I was also astonished to be told that the great mass of medieaval material had never been researched by anybody. That is not a criticism of historians of the present or of the past. It is a fact of life, and I thought my noble friend Lord Beloff spoke a lot of good sense when he pointed out that the quantity of material is not necessarily what the historian needs or wants. The process of selection is difficult and there is an element of chance in what survives.

To contrast the figures I have given, I was myself an ancient historian at university, apart from having studied philosophy. My two periods were from the eighth century BC to about 400 BC; from the death of Caesar, which was in 43 BC, to the death of Trajan. The whole of the material that any historian of those two periods has could have been put into less than one year's product of what has survived into the Public Record Office, and we know that that figure is itself 1 per cent. of what once existed. That is the size of it, yet during the two periods T have mentioned some of the best books on history were written. Thucydides was written in that period, as was Tacitus, but I will not go on enumerating with the noble Lord, Lord Dacre, here, because I feel sure he would be able to expatriate considerably on that.

Since the Wilson Report we have caused a number of spot checks to be made. Four departments have been concerned so far, but more spot checks will be made as time goes on to keep the departments so far as possible on their toes. The four departments which have been spot checked so far have not yielded any evidence that matter is being selectively destroyed which should be kept, or that any serious destruction of valuable matter or matter which could now be seen to be valuable has taken place. I do not know what one noble Lord meant when he said that the committee itself had, for responsible reasons, suppressed evidence which it had. I do not think that has been the case since any Lord Chancellor has been responsible for the Public Record Office, but if there is evidence since 1958, I would certainly have it considered and looked into.

Having said that, I must turn slightly to the role of the Lord Chancellor in the matter. Obviously he cannot supervise it as an ordinary departmental Minister would supervise the work of his department; he is not the Minister of public records and, if he were, he would have to give up being Lord Chancellor altogether. As the noble Lord, Lord Ardwick, pointed out, he is really there because, in a sense, he is slightly removed from the hurly-burly. He is Speaker of your Lordships' House, so he is not subjected to perpetual harassment in another place; he is head of the judiciary; and he tries more or less, although he is a loyal member of his party and of the Cabinet (as I hope I am) rather to stand a little aloof from the day-to-day dust of conflict, except when he is positively driven into it by his political colleagues. So he is really there to defend the Public Record Office, which I hope he does, to supervise its work, and to try to see that the system works as well as may be. I have tried to do that conscientiously. I accept broadly the views about the availability of material, but I cannot myself look at every document. I have sought in various ways to improve the safeguards against undue secrecy, and I may or may not have been successful.

As for PIPs—particular instance papers—to which reference has been made, the reason why there is not more about that in the report is, again, that we agree with the Wilson recommendation on the need to review the handling of them and, resources permitting, we shall implement it. It was not discussed in the White Paper because there was nothing that we could usefully add to the long and interesting passages about it in the report.

Equally, I think that the critics have somewhat underplayed the role of the Public Record Office itself. I accept the emphasis that the Wilson Committee laid on the importance of an effective partnership between the Public Record Office and individual departments. It is our judgment that in broad terms the balance is correctly struck, but we have accepted the importance of improved written guidance to departments which is recommended—we think that it is required—and that the training needs of departmental records staff should be clearly identified and adequately met; though exactly how that can be done is not something which one could easily ensure, except by being a departmental Minister oneself.

The Government have also accepted that the part of getting the balance right depends on departments giving records work sufficient weight. The Principal Establishment Officers of all departments have, since the report, been reminded by the Secretary of the Cabinet of the need to give records work proper guidance from a senior level in the office. I think that perhaps some of the speakers have underestimated the role of the Public Record Office itself in relation to access. The Wilson Report drew attention to the Public Record Office's responsibilities in scrutinising, for instance, the closures under Section 5(1) and its responsibility in regard to retentions under Section 3(4), which are of equal importance, and to which reference has been made.

It is I believe inevitable that intelligence-related documents, on security grounds, should be retained in departments for a prolonged period of time. How long must depend upon the nature of the documents themselves. I cannot accept—and I am sorry to have to say this to the noble Lord, Lord McGregor of Durris— the theory that a few Privy Councillors in the advisory council should be the judge of this. I would rather be the judge of it myself, if I had to be, because as member of the Cabinet I must bear responsibility for that kind of disclosure.

I must say that I was more than disappointed at the scorn which was poured in the debate in another place on the role of the Secretary of the Cabinet as my adviser. I have been a Privy Councillor now for 25 years, I think (if 1956 makes it 25 years) or 26 years, and on any case when I have wanted advice about what is, or what ought to be, intelligence-related or sensitive, I have sought the advice of the Secretary of the Cabinet and he—the holder of that office from time to time—has on occasion actually sought my advice both before I was Lord Chancellor, and since then. There is I think nobody else who can do the job, and I can only say that as the best of judgment in the matter. I found him always accommodating, and the theory that the Lord Chancellor and the Secretary of the Cabinet will not find time for one another when something of importance turns up is, I believe, a mistaken one. We are both busy men, but we both have staff at our disposal, and we both exercise a certain amount of independent judgment when a matter demands individual attention.

I know that reference was made to the proposal for sector panels. I do not think perhaps that the committee c that the committee correctly estimated the resource demands of that. As the noble Lord, Lord McGregor of Durris, pointed out, the resource demands on the Public Record Office are a relatively small part of the cost of record-keeping activities in the Government as a whole. I am told (at least, if my memory is correct) that the current figures, which I think date from a little later than those that the noble Lord gave, are that about £18 million is spent every year on record keeping, of which £7 million comes from the Public Record Office.

I think that perhaps the Wilson Committee underestimated the resource demands on servicing these sector panels and the demands on departments, who would be the primary persons who would have to supply the information. I do not think that the figures concerned are negligible, but I can say that I have not myself the manpower or finance available within my budget either to fund or to service the panels without damaging the existing services to the public; that is to say, the making available of records for inspection and their proper preservation. For myself—although this is a personal judgment—having regard to the magnitude and volume of the task, I also doubt whether the system is workable in principle at all.

I would echo what was said by one speaker, that if the academic world has serious anxieties about the retention of records or their availability, the best course for them is to contact the Public Record Office at the appropriate level and, if the point can be crystalised and is of sufficient importance, to contact the Lord Chancellor himself, when he can pursue inquiries from within the Government machine. I can assure him that, so far as I am concerned, at my somewhat advanced age the theory of what may be disclosed about my present activities in 25 or 30 years' time is a matter I can view with relative equanimity, and I hope I shall be there to view it with equal equanimity when it happens.

I would say again, at the late hour that we have reached, that I take the responsibilities imposed on me extremely seriously; that we have not simply shelved this report; that the White Paper is brief in turn only because it has concentrated on points on which we would desire to qualify the recommendations; that we accept its general analysis and approach to the matter, and that we will do our best during the years to carry it into practice. I must again express not only my congratulations to Lord Bancroft—and may I say that I agreed with almost everything he said—but also my thanks to my noble friend Lord Teviot for giving me the opportunity (an unusual one; I think the first I have had in two terms of office) to talk about this relatively little known feature in my public activities.