Most of our staff are involved with the transfer of records to The National Archives, although we have a team dedicated to retrieving files for FCO needs and we also have a small team which answers historical FOI enquiries. We have approximately 50 staff, and around half of those are sensitivity reviewers who are responsible for reviewing records for any residual sensitivity before those records are released to The National Archives. The rest of our team are either records managers or archive support staff.
Number of files How many files do we hold in our archive? As an approximation we believe we have around 1 million files in the archive and those are overwhelmingly paper records. About three quarters of our paper records are standard departmental files, so they are files which originate from departments which are clearly recognisable as current FCO departments or their predecessors, like Middle East Department; around 250,000 of our paper files we call “Special Collections�, these are records which sit outside the FCO departmental file plan and some of these are quite old. We also manage some archive electronic records, the equivalent of around 40,000 files. Everything that counts as a legacy record, i.e. those over 30-years old, is currently held in compliance with the Public Records Act under a legal instrument granted by the Lord Chancellor. This legal instrument has been granted to allow the FCO one year to develop a prioritised plan for our legacy records which we will be presenting to the Advisory Council in November 2013. Post-meeting note: revised figures for departmental files and special collections are being published on the FCO archive records page on gov.uk.
The records transfer process We start by selecting our files for permanent preservation using a document called Operational Selection Policy 13, which is a selection policy for diplomatic records and which is available on The National Archives website. Broadly speaking, the material that is selected is foreign policy rather than FCO case files. That selection is then quality assured by TNA. We then sensitivity review the files and that is by far the most time-consuming part of the process because all of the files have to be read through; we catalogue those files so they are searchable on The National Archives catalogue; physically prepare the files and then uplift those files to TNA. Only around 1% of the files are redacted, that's to say the content is blanked out because of continuing sensitivity. For standard FCO departmental files the whole transfer process takes about 1 year from the start of the transfer process in the FCO to public release at TNA. 12