Records Management

For transparency, Scottish Ministers should maintain minutes documenting: discussions and decisions between Ministers and civil servants regarding publicly-funded project involvement; discussions with local authorities and contractors; and negotiations, including mediation …

In order to avoid most of the delays and difficulties inherent in this case, and in so many other unsolved cases, there is a need for a review of the …

It is recommended that, whenever a major incident remains under investigation or inquiry, documents should be retained in digitised form, subject to appropriate security measures and made available to those …

Notes of significant meetings between officials and ministers, particularly those affecting decision-making and spending, must be taken and retained. The responsibility for ensuring this is done should be clearly identified …

Ministers' responses to submissions should be formally and timeously recorded and disseminated to officials by the Minister's Private Office. That responsibility should not be left to policy teams. One clear …

The culture and practice of record keeping and access to records within the Northern Ireland Civil Service needs to change so that staff responsible for a given area of work …

Consideration should be given to the establishment of a policy by the Ministry of Defence to ensure that all documents or other material, including electronic material, are retrieved from theatre …

All training material should be dated, appropriately retained and archived in such a way that it can easily be established when the training material was composed, when it came into …

A new regulatory body should consider being explicit that where a public interest justification is to be relied upon, a record should be available of the factors weighing against and …

Given what we discovered about the destruction of prisoners' files, many of which would have been important historical records, we recommend that the SOSNI should satisfy himself whether any other …