Wanless Review

Stephen Mosley Excerpts

Tuesday 11th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

The hon. Lady makes an important point. It will be for the inquiry panel to determine how it is going to report, how frequently it will report, and in what form it will report the work that it does. My personal view is that because of the nature of these issues, the comprehensive nature of its work, and the need for confidence in it that she mentioned, I would like it to report to people on a fairly regular basis so that it can show what it is doing. Indeed, there may be a benefit to that, because if it reports on a piece of work that it has done on, say, identifying a certain set of institutions, that may trigger other people to come forward with further evidence. This will be a matter for the inquiry panel, but I have made clear my view that they should be doing it regularly.

[Stephen Mosley (City of Chester) (Con)]

The Wanless review continually highlights the fact that in the 1980s data relating to parliamentary questions and information about constituents submitted by MPs to Ministers were retained for only two years. What is the position now? Following on from the question by my hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Duncan Hames), would it not make sense to store these data digitally so that they are available for future generations?

[Mrs May]

If I may, I will write to my hon. Friend about the current procedures that are followed by Government Departments in relation to retention of records. The length of time for which a document is kept is determined by its status. There have been a number of models for this across the intervening years. I fully accept that maintaining material in digital fashion is the way forward. However, as I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Duncan Hames), the Government still—how can I put it?—like the paper form and are still, in many cases, keeping the material available to them in that form, but they are moving towards more digitisation.