Letter: Open the files

Sir: Your leading article (25 August) on freedom of information and the Public Record Office (PRO) has got the wrong end of the stick. The PRO's function is to select records for future research, and to this end it and government departments sift through tens of miles of records each year to archive perhaps 5 per cent which are of historical importance.

Reducing the period of time before records come to the national archives from 30 to 10 years will mean the government archives service doing 20 years' work in 12 months. The result - chaos. Only a small fraction of government files would be made available anyway.

Far better to take the PRO out of the equation altogether, and allow the public to have access to records whilst they are still in departments, subject to some sensible criteria of confidentiality. This is what they do in Sweden. Then we can have a sensible, and separate, discussion about how old records should be before they are deposited in the PRO for research purposes, unclouded by the just requirements of the freedom of information lobby.

EDWARD HIGGS

Department of History

University of Exeter