Thirty-year rule

The "thirty-year rule" is the informal name given to laws in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and Australia that provide that certain government documents will be released publicly thirty years after they were created.

In the United Kingdom, the Public Records Act 1958 stated that "Public records ... other than those to which members of the public have had access before their transfer ..., shall not be available for public inspection until they have been in existence for fifty years or such other period ... as the Lord Chancellor may, ... for the time being prescribe as respects any particular class of public records"; the closure period was reduced from fifty to thirty years by an amending act of 1967, passed during Harold Wilson's government. Among those who had repeatedly urged the scrapping of the fifty-year rule was the historian A. J. P. Taylor.

There were two elements to the rule: the first required that records be transferred from government departments to the Public Record Office (now The National Archives) after thirty years unless specific exemptions were given (by the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Council on Public Records); the second that they would be opened to public access at the same time unless their release was deemed likely to cause "damage to the country's image, national security or foreign relations".

Significant changes were made to the rules as a consequence of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) (which came into full effect on 1 January 2005). FOIA essentially removed the second of the thirty-year rules (the access one), and replaced it with provisions allowing citizens to request a wide range of information before any time limit has expired; and also removed some of the exemptions which had previously applied at the thirty-year point. After thirty years, records are transferred to The National Archives, and are reviewed under FOIA to see if they should be opened. The only rationale for keeping them closed within The National Archives is if a FOIA exemption applies.

As a result of this change, releases now happen monthly, rather than annually, and include more recent events, rather than only those over thirty years old.

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