British Government Orders E Mail Purge To Hide Corruption Evidence

Herald Sun | December 19 2004

MILLIONS of e-mails to British government staff will be automatically wiped out on Monday, 11 days before freedom of information laws come into force, a newspaper reported Saturday.

The Cabinet Office, which supports Prime Minister Tony Blair and co-ordinates government policy, has ruled that e-mails more than three months old must be deleted from December 20, according to The Times.

Its 2,000 civil servants are being told to print and file e-mails that should be disclosed under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, the newspaper said.

It will be up to the individual which e-mails are printed, with no monitoring from heads of department. Many officials, who receive about 100 e-mails a day, will have at least 3,000 items in their mailboxes, it said.

Although the deleted e-mails will be stored on back-up systems, these have been declared off limits to freedom of information requests because of the cost of accessing them, it added.Mo< The Conservative opposition party said Blair's Labour government was deliberately trying to destroy embarrassing information.

"This begs the question how much more does the Labour administration need to hide," Michael Fabricant, the Shadow Minister for Industry and Technology, was quoted as saying.

The decision also raises questions about whether the trail of correspondence which brought down David Blunkett, the former home secretary, would have surfaced.

The Cabinet Office insisted that the exercise was not related to the Freedom of Information Act but was "good records management practice," to stop files blocking the system.