§ Mr. Ieuan Wyn JonesTo ask the Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department if he will make a statement on public access to Public Record Office document AIR 2/16918. [21359]
§ Mr. StreeterThe question concerns a matter which has been assigned to the Public Record Office under the terms of its framework document. I have therefore asked the chief executive to write to the hon. Member.
Letter from Sarah Tyacke to Mr. Ieuan Wyn Jones, dated 21 March 1997:
The Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department, has asked me to reply for the Public Record Office to your question about this document.The document was open to public inspection in July 1990. Under the Public Records Acts 1958 and 1967, once a document has been opened to public inspection it cannot be closed again. Documents may be withdrawn temporarily by their department of origin, but this did not happen with AIR 2/16918 and even if it had happened arrangements could have been made for it to be consulted at the Ministry of Defence.We know from our records of document usage that AIR 2/16918 was consulted by members of the public on several occasions between 1990 and 1996. In April 1996, it was in our Reprographic section for some photographs to be taken, but it appears that it was subsequently misplaced and, despite several searches, we have so far been unable to locate it.I am very sorry that it is currently unavailable for consultation and we shall continue to search for it. I shall let you know when we find it. By way of explanation, but not in mitigation, I should add that we hold several million documents on 160 kilometres of shelving, processing over a million document movements each year, and that occasionally and regrettably human error does lead to misplacements.