The story that emails sent from Education Secretary Michael Gove’s wife’s email account might count as official emails for Freedom of Information purposes rumbles on. This is an interesting point:

Department for Education spokesman said: “Emails are not automatically considered an official record. Special advisers are not required to maintain records of deleted emails. All civil servants routinely delete or archive emails, taking account of their nature and content.

“Government systems could not operate if every civil servant kept every email they send or received (sic). The act of deleting emails is not evidence of wrong doing.”

Fair enough? Or not?

When the FCO brought in email communication first on a clunky internal system then on a more familiar Windows-based system, the use of emails of course exploded. And the FCO had to think about what to do with them all.

Various categories of email were devised, reflecting security classifications for documents set up under utterly different conditions. So for a while until a network-wide Confidential system was rolled out to the huge majority of posts (over several years) the ‘Unclassified’ parts of the network could send and receive only Unclassified emails, leaving them largely excluded from the day to day email chatter at HQ in London. This was part of Craig Murray’s problem in Uzbekistan – he did not have a CONF system and so substantively was isolated from much of the policy debate in the FCO. This frustrating situation led to him to start using the ‘telegram’ level for communicating his thoughts to a vast bemused Whitehall audience, and it all went downhill from there.

The really staggeringly stupid thing the FCO did was not insist from the start on a sound system for email retention. If I wanted to send an email to someone on the network, I just sent it. The message would be stored in my Sent box on Outlook until I moved it to an Outlook file or saved it elsewhere on my computer. Thus over time my Outlook space became clogged with all the folders of emails I’d created as a sort of private registry system. It could be searched by me but not by anyone else other than remote system controllers who were essentially technicians and network security minders.

In other words, if a member of the public or even a fellow colleague wanted information on (say) UK policy towards Montenegro, there was no meaningful way that the fast proliferating mass of emails on that subject across the FCO network could be searched. Partly this was for classic internal ‘Need to Know’ reasons. Better not to have a centrally searchable database open to all FCO staff lest anyone who got into the system illicitly might scoop the whole lot.

There was in fact an easy solution. Namely that before sending an email the sender would have to choose from a drop-down menu which might give one of the following options, following which the message would be automatically stored centrally and be searchable by those who needed to do so:

  • Ephemeral/Unimportant – Delete after three Months
  • Ephemeral but Operationally Significant – Delete after One Year
  • Policy Relevant but Operationally Insignificant – Delete after One Year
  • Policy Relevant – Keep

These classifications or something like them would have covered the nuts and bolts exchanges on eg organising visits, which by definition are mainly irrelevant and unneeded once the visit is over. They also would have allowed FCO officials to set timelines for keeping messages which had some current policy relevance that was set to dwindle over time (eg analysis of the prospects for Montenegro as elections approached – interesting at the time, but not mattering much a year after the election). Above all, they would have given officials a chance quickly to designate an email message as worthy of prolonged retention/searchability and eventual sending on to the Public Records Office for the national archives.

All this could have been complemented by a requirement that each email message have in its title three or four key words (Montenegro Economy Bilateral Steel) which would be a fast way of helping find emails on a certain subject in months and years to come.

What instead happened was that cumbersome arrangements were set up for ‘saving’ emails (or not) separately from sending them. With the result that few officers saved more than a handful. Even though I must have produced thousands of emails in my final seven years in the FCO I don’t recall saving permanently any at all(!), although as Ambassador my main senior policy effort was via ‘telegrams’ sent electronically (E-grams) which were in a category of their own and saved automatically by HQ. Plus I assumed that if anything really important came up arising from what I had sent, I would be able to find the trail in my Outlook private filing cabinet.

That said, when I left post the whole mass of work I had sent by email was summarily deleted. Gone.

In all this it was never clear how far anything was really finally deleted once and for all. Presumably the messages were also captured on central FCO servers. Yet without some sensible way of searching through the gazillions of messages which even a small government department like the FCO generated each year, they might as well have been deleted.

In short, it is likely to be relatively easy to track down recent official working papers where the people who created them are still at their desks (see eg my request re that astounding FCO Bullying training event, where I have sent a follow-up request to get more accurate costings after the FCO said that they did not know what the event had cost).

But for anything much older the chances of getting anything like a full set of papers (if such a thing is even imaginable in our chattering e-age) are much reduced. Oddly enough if you go further back to the days of predominantly paper records things might get easier again, as physical files telling a story were kept. See eg the impressive reply to my FOI request for papers on the FCO’s policy on homosexuality in the 1980s.

Basically:

  • there has never been a policy that all official papers are kept for the main Public Record
  • ‘weeding’ of papers and emails goes on all the time – it indeed is not evidence of wrong-doing (although some deleting may be wrong-doing)
  • FOI is never going to be much better than the ambient information management systems in any government department
  • in most modern democracies including our own the level of transparency is remarkable and historically unprecedented
  • the more the public demands that almost everything ‘official’ be open to scrutiny, the more likely it is that informal arrangements will emerge to keep some sensitive exchanges off the record, as has happened in the Michael Gove case
  • that’s human nature