1 - The Black Vault

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that over a period of eight weeks. In other words he should get his copies by Christmas. My EO
has other things to do and we at a particularly busy time checking material closed for more that
30 years that should also be re leased in January.
Page 3 of 3
Your final question
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D r Cl ar k e . ts qutte . ng . h t t h ere . ts . m d ee d not h" mg to stop d epartment evtewmg an d trans ernng
records to Kew and arranging for release in advance of 30 years. he White Paper on Open
Government, published July 1993, offered this as an option, subject to resources.
You may wish to say this to Dr Clarke:
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"The White Paper on Open Government identified an number of initiates that, subject to
resources, that would lead to the release of material closed for more than 30 years and also
encouraged the release of blocks of material in advance of the normal date. Hitherto, the
Ministry of Defence has , as have a number of other government departments, concentrated on
records closed in excess of 30 years. To date more than 11,700 such records have been
released since July 1993.
Also, as with other government departments the MOD has a structured review programme and in
compliance with Public Record Office guidelines the final review of record s takes place at the 2 5
year point. The MOD has no thematic database of records due for review, as a consequence
review occurs according to date rather than subject.
This present exercise has apparently identified a few files that would appear to fall outside the
kind of UFO material that hitherto has been preserved ie reports from members of the public.
Consideration will now be given to seeing whether these few files could not be processed and
released in advance of the normal date." {On this point would DAS(Sec) wish Records to
progressively review and release all surviving UFO material in advance of the designated
date. Although, a special exercise review would be fairly straight forward what would take
time the is the deletion of personal details from files]
Rather longer that I hoped but I trust that it answers your questions.
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