Files

Files.  They are more than just little icons on your desktop.  The are more than just the things that contain lots of paper which you put into a shelf and forget about until you need the things from it.  They are, in fact, a bunch of papers that hold lots of useful information in.  Governments create lots of files all the time and that is where the FoI act comes in!  You see these files contain everything from how much was spent to where it was spent to whom spent it.  It also shows the most important thing of all, which is WHY your money is being spent.  

So what do councils do to hold files and where do they go?  The fact is Information is expensive to make, expensive to analyse, and expensive to store. So how do councils hold all this information?  Well they all have guidelines on how they store their information.  Think about it, Merthyr Tydfil has got minutes of its meetings going back to 1866, that is a hell of a lot of files!  So what do they do with them all?  Well under Data protection, all personal information has to be destroyed by professional document destroyers (Neither did I!).  

A lot of it though is stored and then it is used at later dates.  Councils have to have records of what they own and what they are responsible for and also be able to have files which show them how things have developed.  So why am I interested in finding files?  Because they show what the council was thinking of and why they were looking into different subjects. Also, it nails their colours to the mast over the excuse that we do not have the files (If you want to see some of the details of how the courts store their files then check this link out here).

Now the thing is, ALL government agencies have to give their files to the National Archive after thirty years (And some of the amazing thing that our government have thought about can be found in this amazing podcast here).  Not all government organisations do (For example, I am still awaiting a response on this) but most will. The reasons that this is interesting is that is shows everything that the organisation was thinking and worrying about.  It holds so much more information than we can even consider!

Is this the case, however, with local government?  Well a quick check with the National Archives (where they store all old government files) showed that they do have some (and a quick check with the Advisory Council on National Records and Archives is a result I am still waiting on, at time of writing). So that is an interesting thing if nothing else.

Can you imagine what gems there could be stored there?  Well that is another project for another day.  The thing that I am interested in now is, do local council SEND files to the national archives. If they do then we can find out what they are sending and on and what are the rules that they have in sending their files (Freedom of information really is interesting!).

Well that brought me to sending a request to all welsh councils saying “DO you send files to the national archive?”.  Resoundingly, they all said no. Which is fine, but a little annoying.  The interesting part, however, was that this was NOT the end of the story.  You see, all the people in FoI really do want you to know about what is going on.  As a result of my FoI request with five of the council I found out that there is such a thing as the Gwent Archive AND the Ceredigion Archives.

Now this gets me excited (isnt my my wife a lucky woman marrying someone who gets excited about files…). They are almost a little national archives and they are here in wales!  So if you want to find out more about your area (And you live in one of the areas that they cover), give them a ring!  You will find out all about the cold war strictures that there are there!  Didn't know that they were there, well that is covered in ANOTHER blog.