By Dan Ilett, 23 December 2004 09:55
NEWS The Office of the Information Commissioner is investigating the Cabinet Office for deleting millions of emails days before they would be made available to the public.
The government watchdog said on Wednesday it would look 'unfavourably' on the Cabinet Office if it was deleting emails because of the Freedom of Information Act.
A spokesperson for the Information Commissioner's Office said: "If the emails have been deleted then this is something the Information Commissioner would take very seriously. And if it is happening because of the Freedom of Information Act, it would be looked on unfavourably."
The Cabinet Office (CO), which on Monday claimed it was deleting emails to save taxpayers' money, said on Wednesday it was deleting emails because it has no archiving space left.
A spokesperson for the Cabinet Office said: "Our systems are being overloaded, which is why we are doing it. We are coming to our contract year-end and [emails] are clogging up the system."
The CO added that it was still archiving material relating to policy, legislation, senior management and decision-making.
Yesterday, the head of the All Party Internet Group, Derek Wyatt MP, slammed the Cabinet Office for deleting emails. Wyatt, who is leading a parliamentary charge against spammers, said he would be disappointed if the government had resorted to clearing inboxes as a way of avoiding embarrassment from the Freedom of Information Act (FoI).
"It's wrong," said Wyatt. "Everyone knew about the Freedom of Information three years ago. Everyone signed up for it. The whole idea was to open up government and bureaucracy. If they have been deleting emails then I'm disappointed. End of story. We as MPs have been scrutinised on expenses for years. Why shouldnÂ’t the government?"
The Institute for the Management of Information Systems (IMIS) was puzzled by the CO's actions. Philip Virgo, strategic advisor to the Institute for the Management of Information Systems, said: "It really is an odd thing to do. Either you don't keep emails at all or you have a policy of auto-archiving them. But blanket deletion after three months is unusual."
The FoI is intended to provide the public with access to information from government organisations, such as hospitals, police stations and civil service department. The law comes into effect on 1 January, 2005.
Comments
There are 4 comments. Join the discussion
1. Dan Dexter
How many more excuses are the Cabinet Office going to come up with? First it was “Don’t worry, we're going to keep the important emails and print them out” – which implies that they’re going to spend millions of man-hours reading every email and deciding whether to keep them or not. This will cost perhaps a thousand times more than just keeping all the emails in a system such as Cryoserver, which can also find any email in the repository in less than a second.
Oh dear me no, we can’t have that. Let’s do away with all this electronic nonsense and go back to the good old days of bits of paper. And don’t forget that there’s a key benefit to paper - FOI and DPA requests can be ignored if records are kept in a manual file system (e.g. unsorted paper-based).
Anyway, good to hear the Information Commissioner will ‘look unfavourably’ at what they’re up to. In the USA they’ll send people to jail for deleting emails, but here I guess ‘look unfavourably’ is about as good as it gets….
2. Tania Chee
Thanks Dan for the Cryoserver plug - we owe you a mince pie!
I have only one question for the Cabinet Office: Why have local authorities from all over the country bought Cryoserver systems to import and make searchable all their old emails in readiness for FoI requests, whereas the Cabinet Office thinks it should take the direct opposite approach?
Even more strangely, the Cabinet Office selected Cryoserver as the only approved specialist email archiving vendor when they instigated a project to RETAIN all their email. So what happened to that plan, chaps?
Some sort of change of heart? Or did they mix up their Document Retention Policy with their Document Deletion Policy?
3. Ed Daniel
If the Government is going to spend our money then I do hope that they make use of this opportunity to investigate 'Enterprise Email Intelligence'; as have several local councils who discovered there are several options available in the marketplace.
After all the Government keep espousing our nation's desire to be a leading knowledge-economy, it would be great to see them implement that strategy through intelligent solution selection as well - is not email intelligence one of the most informative communication mediums we can get access to?
Already several local councils have made the step beyond trying to just solve the problem of archiving and retrieval and look at recent innovations from the software industry in the context of their own business processes.
There are several gains to be had:
Reduced infrastructure requirements
Reduced storage requirements
Increased productivity
Increased efficiency
New product innovation
So, besides archiving perhaps they could look at the whole picture of their communications and what the impact of better management of that could lead to.
Less tax? Perhaps.
4. anonymous
Suppose they will be blaming the cancelled ITNet contract next. There is so much b****** talked about can't archive everything and there is so much rubbish mail because of SPAM etc. Horses**t - Get a Spam/virusb filter like everyone else.
'Running out of Archive space', buy some more storage space, it is cheaper than paper or man-effort in purging e-mail.