Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the reply by Lord Ashton of Hyde on 24 April (HL Deb, cols 600–602), whether records held by the National Lottery Heritage Fund were digitally recorded before the physical copies were de-stroyed; if so, what form this digitisation took; what facilities the digital version offers; who holds the digitised version; and what access there is for the public and other users.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund (the Fund) digitally recorded documents critical to its grant contracts, and securely destroyed records no longer required for retention. The documents that were retained were scanned in PDF format. The retained records are held by the Fund, and are not accessible to the public because they contain confidential commercial information. Data regarding the Fund’s grant decisions has recently been released as part of its commitment to Open Data.