Home Office Missing Files

It has been fascinating to watch the unfolding events over the 114 missing official files linked to investigations of a 1980s paedophile ring at Westminster.

Yesterday, I watched the Home Office permanent secretary Mark Sedwill explain to the Home Affairs Select Committee that most of these files had "probably been destroyed".

Well, really?  Are we supposed to believe that?  In a word, yes.

A few short weeks ago, I finished a lifetime of public service in the Civil Service.

When I joined, all documents were stored in large filing cabinets in the offices where the work was carried out. Particularly sensitive documents were placed in locked cabinets.  If something went missing, staff downed tools and searched for the document until it turned up.

The 1980s represented an enormous shock to public services when the new Thatcher government cut back ruthlessly on spending.  

As the cuts began to bite, departments needed to find new ways of spending less money and one of the ideas was to store documents in remote locations, effectively large warehouses miles away.   Files and documents would be bagged up and sent away and if they were needed again at a later day, staff locally could request them. 

It was not unusual for documents to simply disappear.  I am sure they were not routinely destroyed but the number that could not be found was alarming.  And many of them would be required for such things as fraudulent benefit claims, what the law enforcement agencies might refer to as evidence.  A lost claim form in the DWP might be a false statement and if it was lost the implications for a criminal investigation could be very serious.

The next step with these remote storage facilities was to privatise them and so mean they were run for profit and local government offices now had to pay to have their own documents to be transported back to them.

But the view from the top was that you could not always keep everything.  Some documents and files were not necessarily sensitive and even if they were, the argument went, after a few years they would lose that sensitivity.

So documents, forms, files and the like began to be destroyed after a few years.  Destroyed by government diktat on the grounds of efficiencies, or cuts as they should properly known.

I know for a fact that many, if not all, departments had similar policies with old records and documents and Mark Sedwill's comments at the Home Office suggest I am right.

Now we have an horrific situation where a paedophile ring may have existed and there were documents that suggested who was involved and when and that these documents no longer exist.  You can imagine the implications for prosecuting authorities and you can also imagine some seriously unpleasant people blowing sighs of relief.

I do not sense a conspiracy here - the cock up theory seems more likely - but it shows once again that the endless drive for more efficiencies (cuts) and the need to do everything on the cheap have implications that go way beyond what they were intended to do. 

Where I worked, staff were always warning of the dangers of destroying evidence but no one listened.

It would be terrible if it turned out that there are people out there who have suffered terrible abuse who may never get justice because the evidence has been shredded in order to save a few bob.