Tories are lying *******s (warning may contain traces of Tory)

[Mibbes Aye]

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I always thought that stuff like this was transferred to digital records before being destroyed. I suppose the sheer volume of old records makes this impossible. Either way it’s a shocking state of affairs whoever gave the orders.

I thought the same. I think you’re right though, volume is probably beyond our imagination and it’s a combination of some of it transferring to digital and some civil servant making a case that it doesn’t need to be kept at all and hard copy can therefore be destroyed - and in fairness that’s probably true for some records. The cost of destroying confidential records isn’t cheap so the higher the volume then the cost should be cheaper, in relative terms.

What’s interesting is there was an outline business case, in 2009. That’s a formal document and theoretically it should describe why it was safe to destroy the documents as well as economical. My interpretation is that civil servants would have had to do an OBC whenever a cull of particular records was being mooted.

In which case surely the BBC have already submitted an FOI unless it’s already been rejected - commercial sensitivity would be one likely reason, though it was nearly ten years ago so that might be hard to argue.