Departmental Archives

Mr. Hancock
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what factors were taken into account when the original decision was made to store in his Department’s archives the two files referred to in his answer of 7 November 2006, Official Report, column 1453W.

Derek Twigg
File WO208/3548 and extract WO208/3654, were originally reviewed in accordance with the terms of the Public Records Acts 1958 and 1967. They were assessed as being suitable for permanent preservation at the Public Record Office (now The National Archives) but were judged then to be too sensitive for release. They were therefore retained in the Department in accordance with section 3(4) of the Public Records Act with the approval of the Lord Chancellor. Their sensitivity would routinely have been re-reviewed every 10 years.

These items were retained with similarly sensitive material in the central Ministry of Defence archive, which, in 2003 was found to have been contaminated by asbestos. WO208/3654 has since been re-constituted, re-reviewed and released to The National Archives. Unfortunately a search of the list of material removed from the contaminated archive has shown that WO208/3548 is not recorded. Further searches will be made for this file as the scanning project to recover contaminated files proceeds.