Request
1) How many records currently have an access under review (AUR) status?
2) Of records with a current AUR status, please provide
a) A breakdown of the number by transferring department or agency (e.g. Cabinet Office, Met Police, High Court)
b) A breakdown of the number by referrer of the document for AUR status (e.g. Cabinet Office, TNA Staff, member of public)
3) Of records with a current AUR status, which have not yet received a final review at the reclosure panel, please list the dates that each document received an AUR status. If it is easier to group this, for example, by month, please let me know.
4) How many records due to be released on the 1st January 2024 by TNA were given a temporary AUR status? What proportion of the total records due to be disclosed does this constitute?
5) In your reply to FOI 013801503 you state: “The second means by which a record may be reclosed involves government departments submitting applications directly for open records to be reclosed.”
Please state the number of reclosure requests of this type received by the TNA since January 1st 2023.
Please provide a breakdown of this number by the department or public body making the request, and if held and retrievable within the cost limit, the grounds of request for reclosure (E.g. personal information FOIA exemption).
Outcome
Some information provided
Response
1) 19,609. This figure was accurate on 2 July 2024 when the report on files with an AUR status was generated. This figure represents 0.12% of the approximately 16,500,000 documents that we hold in our collection. The AB series (8,161 records) and the ES series (4,658 records) are subject to a full review by the transferring departments, combined these equal 65% of the total of records on AUR.
2a) I have attached a spreadsheet that contains a list of AUR records created via the report we are able to run (see response to Q1).
This report does not capture the corresponding transferring department for each AUR record. However, the letter code for each AUR record typically corresponds with the transferring department. You can find out which series belongs to which transferring department by searching for each series code on Discovery (https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/), and navigating to the series-level information. For example, the corresponding transferring department for AB records can be found here(https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C2).
2b) We do not hold this information. The report we are able to generate on AUR records does not list the source of where each AUR referral has come from.
3) The attached spreadsheet contains the date each of the 19,609 records referenced in Q1 that were made AUR. Our report is only able to capture data on records made AUR since 2008. We do not have the dates for records that were made AUR before 2008. This report does not capture data on whether these records have received a final review at the reclosure panel. The dataset requested is a list of records with an AUR status; this is not data that is necessarily relevant to files being placed AUR under TNA’s reclosure policy (https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/legal/takedown-and-reclosure-policy/#:~:text=The%20reclosure%20policy%20describes%20the,Archives%20for%20preservation%20as%20archives.), and it is unlikely that the majority of these AUR records will be seen by the Reclosure Panel. The Reclosure Panel only considers cases reviewed by TNA’s FOI Team, and the majority of these AUR files will instead be reviewed by the transferring department. Where information is to be reclosed under a qualified FOI exemption, the department will then either submit a closure application to the Advisory Council on National Records and Archives (whose recommendation for closure is submitted to DCMS for agreement by the Secretary of State), or request the removal of the AUR status. As previously explained, a record with an AUR status may end up being reclosed under the FOI Act, or it may have its AUR status removed, and thereby placed back into public access.
4) As of 24th January 2024, there were 2,063 records due to be released on the 1st January 2024 that were given a temporary AUR status. The proportion of the total records due be disclosed that this constitutes is 2,063 out of a total of 6,016 records which were due to be opened on 1st January 2024 (34.3%).
5) We are not able to provide a figure based on recorded information in the format you have requested. We do hold schedules of closure applications that are submitted to the Advisory Council on National Records and Archives (ACNRA), and these have a section that is listed under ‘reclosure’, but the applications on these do not distinguish between whether an application was the result of a decision made by the Reclosure Panel (under TNA’s Reclosure Policy), or whether it came direct from a department. As we do not hold this figure, we are unable to proceed with the second part of this question.