Beating the lawyers

Before he died, my grandfather decided to write his autobiography. Sadly, not much of it made it onto a computer and I now have sheets of barely legible scrawl to work my way through. I’ve just found an absolute gem… Before you read on, remember that my grandfather was the head of what was to become the National Archives…

I learnt to get my own back on the nit picking lawyers by throwing back at them some of my own mischievous legal concerns. My best one was to argue that s5 of the PRAct of 1958 did not create a right for members of the public to see documents which were more than 50 years old (the 30 year rule came later). I argued that the act said that “public records in the PRO [...] shall not be available until they have been in existence for fifty years [...]“. I contested that this did not say that such records must be made available. The Lord Chancellor agreed with me; and I was happy to agree that unless challenged we would ignore this bit of bad drafting.

I was also concerned about the definition of “records selected for preservation [...] shall be transferred not later than 30 years after their creation” when I discovered that two or three departments, including the Press Office, would simply create a minute, date is just before the last paper turned 30 years old, thus keeping the file from the PRO for another 30 years. This was not sloppy drafting, but merely a lack of understanding of [unclear word] procedures when senior officials wanted to keep files closed. This teased my lawyer friends, but I did [unclear word] departments to avoid this function (I expect the result was simply to shred such files and register them as ‘missing’).

Tags: family, government, stupid laws, stupid people, very cool