Royals, Records and Access Rights: A Very Surprising Story

Follow British biographer Andrew Lownie's work long enough, and you may notice something unusual. For years, Lownie has been raising questions about Britain's government and royal archives that should sound remarkably familiar to records managers.

What records exist? Who holds them? How can a researcher discover what an archive has? Why are records closed? Who makes that decision? When should government records be transferred? And under what circumstances can an already-open record be closed again?

Lownie has been asking these questions publicly for years. His battles over access have attracted attention because of the famous people whose records he seeks. But listen carefully to what he has been saying about the records themselves, and another story emerges.

It's a records-management story. And it's a remarkable one.

Lownie is a historian, literary agent and biographer who has spent decades researching prominent figures in the British establishment. His subjects have included Edward VIII, Guy Burgess and Lord and Lady Mountbatten. As his battles over access have continued, he has drawn attention to the complicated intersection of government records, private royal archives,

Freedom of Information law and public access.

Because the story involves the Royal Family, secret papers, government officials and years of litigation, it is also considerably more entertaining than most lessons in records management.

When Keeping the Record Isn't Enough

Records managers spend a great deal of time thinking about preservation.

Will the record survive? Is it being retained for the appropriate period? Can it be located? Is its integrity protected? Will historically significant material eventually reach an archive?

Lownie's experience raises another question: What good is a perfectly preserved record if no one can find it or see it?

His research into the Mountbattens eventually led to a six-year battle over access to their diaries and correspondence.

The University of Southampton acquired the Mountbatten archive in 2011 with substantial public financial support. Yet when Lownie tried to access portions of the collection while researching his biography of the Mountbattens, it led to Freedom of Information requests, appeals and litigation. Eventually, the Cabinet Office released about 33,000 pages.

Lownie has said that obtaining the material cost him more than £400,000 in legal fees. The Cabinet Office later reported its own legal costs associated with the litigation at £180,454.

A remarkable records-management fact is buried in that story. The records weren't lost. An archival institution had preserved, acquired, and maintained them. Yet a qualified researcher still spent years trying to see them.

Preservation is not access.

How Do You Request a Record You Don't Know Exists?

The access problem becomes even more interesting when we consider discovery.

Lownie has repeatedly criticized the difficulty researchers face in determining exactly what the Royal Archives holds. The Royal Archives provides information about its collections and is working to make more information available through Royal Archives Online, but it does not offer the kind of comprehensive public catalog a researcher might expect from a national public archive.

That creates a problem that anyone working in records management should immediately recognize.

A researcher must identify the material they want to see. But how does a researcher formulate an effective request without knowing what records exist?

Imagine being told that you may order from a restaurant, but there is no menu. What would you like? Well, what do you have? Tell us what you want, and we'll tell you whether we have it.

It sounds almost comic until you consider what it means for access.

Discovery is part of access. A record can be beautifully preserved, appropriately protected, and theoretically available to researchers, but if there is no reasonable way for a researcher to discover that it exists, its availability may be considerably more theoretical than practical.

You cannot meaningfully exercise a right of access to a record you have no way of knowing exists.

Then There Is Reclosure

Another issue Lownie has been drawing attention to introduces a records-management concept that may surprise people outside the profession: reclosure.

Under The National Archives' procedures, a record that was previously open to the public can, under certain circumstances, be placed into an "Access Under Review" status. Staff then assess the information to determine whether it should remain open, be released with redactions, or be reclosed.

Legitimate reasons can drive this. For example, historical material opened under earlier standards may raise privacy and data-protection concerns.

Reclosure is not inherently improper.

But it is a fascinating lifecycle event.

The record was preserved. It was transferred. It was catalogued. It was reviewed. It was opened. Researchers could access it. Then something happened that prompted a reconsideration of its access status.

We often imagine archival access moving in one direction: closed, reviewed, open. The actual lifecycle can be closed, reviewed, open, under review, and closed again.

Access, in other words, has a lifecycle too.

For a records manager, that immediately raises the next set of questions. Who can initiate reclosure? What criteria are applied? Is redaction considered before complete closure? Is the decision documented? Can it be challenged? Is the new restriction finite? Who reviews it again?

These are not questions about whether sensitive information should ever be protected. Of course it should. They ask whether the process for protecting it is governed as carefully as the record itself.

Government Records Meet Royal Records

The governance becomes even more unusual when Lownie's research reaches Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Andrew served as the United Kingdom's Special Representative for International Trade and Investment from 2001 until 2011. That was an official government role, and Lownie has sought government records documenting that work.

Now the records manager has to pay very close attention to where a particular record resides, because government records and records held by the Royal Archives do not operate under identical access regimes.

The Royal Archives describes itself as a private archive. The Royal Household is not a public authority under the UK's Freedom of Information Act, and the Royal Archives' records are not public records under the Public Records Acts. Access is governed by the Royal Archives' own policies and is granted by the Keeper of the Royal Archives on behalf of the Sovereign.

That doesn't mean the Royal Archives simply keeps everything secret. It provides research access and presumes openness, subject to review and restrictions. But there is an important legal distinction: there is no statutory Freedom of Information right of access to Royal Archives holdings.

Meanwhile, government-held records involving the Royal Family can sit within the Freedom of Information regime, although special exemptions apply to certain royal communications.

The subject can therefore be the same. The government activity can be the same. The historical importance can be the same. But the governance framework can differ depending on who holds the record.

The record didn't change. Its custodian did.

Who Decides What Stays Closed?

Then we reach another part of the machinery that deserves records managers' attention: who participates in decisions about keeping historical government records closed or retaining them within government rather than transferring them.

The Advisory Council on National Records and Archives advises the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport on matters involving public records and represents the public interest when government departments seek approval to retain historical records or keep transferred records closed.

Its membership is deliberately broad. It includes people with experience in archives, history, information management, law and public administration. It therefore includes records and information expertise.

But that is not the only expertise represented.

Members also include former senior civil servants and people with substantial careers in Britain's government and national-security institutions. One current member, Martin Howard, previously held senior positions at GCHQ, the Cabinet Office Joint Intelligence Organization and Defense Intelligence.

That doesn't establish that decisions are improper, nor does a former government career disqualify someone from making a fair decision. But from an information-governance perspective, the composition matters because it shapes how the public interest in access is balanced against government arguments for continued restriction.

And that raises another very records-management question: Who governs the governors?

Good governance does not merely establish who has authority to restrict access. It should make the decision-making process understandable, establish the basis on which decisions are made, and provide mechanisms for review or challenge.

The question is not whether government sometimes has legitimate reasons to keep records closed. Clearly it does.

The question is whether the system makes those decisions accountable.

The Record Didn't Change. Its Governance Did.

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as a wonderfully British constitutional oddity involving palaces, government departments and royal correspondence.

It isn't.

Records managers encounter less glamorous versions of the same problems all the time. An employee conducts official business through a personal account. A contractor performs work on behalf of a public agency. Records move during a merger or reorganization. An executive treats official correspondence as personal correspondence. Information moves into another repository or system. A public record resides somewhere other than the system the organization normally uses to manage public records.

The technology can change. The repository can change. The custodian can change. The obligations associated with the information do not necessarily disappear because the record moved.

That is why records governance has to follow the record.

Access Is More Than Saying Yes

Lownie's work ultimately illustrates something larger about records management. Access isn't a single decision made at the end of the records lifecycle. Meaningful access depends on an entire chain of records-management activities working together.

The record has to be preserved. Someone has to be able to discover that it exists. It must have enough description to identify it. Someone has to be accountable for it. The rules governing access have to be identifiable.

Restrictions need a defensible basis. Decisions need review mechanisms.

And, if information that was once public can subsequently be withdrawn, reclosure itself needs governance.

Failure at any one of those points can make excellent performance at the others almost irrelevant.

You can preserve a record perfectly for 100 years. If nobody knows it exists, you have preserved something they cannot discover. If they can discover it but cannot determine how to request it, discovery hasn't accomplished much. If they can request it but cannot determine why it is closed, accountability becomes difficult. And if something once available can subsequently be withdrawn, there had better be a defensible process governing that decision.

The Biographer Who Started Asking Records Questions

Perhaps that is what makes Andrew Lownie's work so interesting to records managers.

He didn't set out to audit British information governance. He wanted to write books.

But researching those books repeatedly brought him face-to-face with the machinery controlling government and historical records. For years, he has called attention to what he found there.

What do you have? Where is it? Why can't I see it? Who made that decision? What authority did they use? When will the restriction expire? Why wasn't this transferred? Why isn't there a catalog showing me what exists? Why was something that was previously accessible closed again?

Those aren't merely a frustrated researcher's questions.

They are records-management questions.

And every records program should be able to answer them.

Strip away the famous names and the castles and the underlying problem becomes remarkably familiar. A record was created. Someone preserved it.

Someone has custody of it. Someone else has a legitimate reason for seeking it.

Now comes the real test.

Can the requester discover that the record exists? Can they identify who controls it? Can they determine which rules apply? If access is restricted, can they determine why? Can the decision be reviewed? Can an open record subsequently be closed? Who makes that decision? And what happens when related records documenting the same activity sit under entirely different governance regimes?

An archive can preserve history and still make history extraordinarily difficult to see.

Keeping the record is only the beginning. The real test is whether we can discover it, understand who controls it, determine the rules that govern it, and hold someone accountable for what happens next.