Having read carefully all the online documents that have been made available, both by the National Archives and the action group that is resisting the proposed changes, I have the following comments to make.

The arguments put forward by National Archives’ management appear to me to be shallow and unconvincing. The documents published so far appear to imply that this is a voluntary initiative by the National Archives’ management.

Alastair Darling says that this autumn he will reveal the government’s plans for cuts in public expenditure in 2010, but they are already leaking out, e.g. the revelation today of similar cuts at British Council.

What is happening at the National Archives is clearly a requirement imposed by the Treasury because of the ongoing economic crisis and the impact of the bank bail-out.

It is only to be expected that the National Archives’ current costs will rise because of the requirement to catalogue and retrieve a continually growing number of public documents.

It is a disappointing reflection on the advocacy skills and/or defeatist attitude of the National Archives’ management that the documents indicate that no increase in funding is anticipated to cope with a further increase in research activity, which can be safely predicted (albeit not accurately quantified) after the 30 year rule is amended.

To what extent has the Treasury been engaged in discussions about the inevitable increase in activity and the consequence for National Archives’ operating costs? What prospect is there for restitution of the National Archives’ budget after 2012 when the budget of the Department for Culture Media and Sport no longer has to bear the cost of the Olympics?

Ian M. Johnson
(retired) Professor of Information Management
Aberdeen Business School
The Robert Gordon University

I am an occasional user of the NA at Kew both for Genealogy and for historical research.
Unlke many historians, I am unfunded and academic publication is in general unpaid.

I support the campaign to prevent the closing of the archive on Mondays. The concentration of visits into a shorter time frame will increase pressure on readers and staff alike and make consistent , painstaking research more difficult.

Historical research is much like detective work – reading one file leads to the discovery of another – too late sometimes for it to be delivered the same day. One may be asked to return on another day to read the next file. Frequent short visits have characterised my own s ea rch in the a rchives.

So shortening the working week and charging for car parking by the day – just doesnt fit with my own past use of the archives.

I am lucky enough to live locally – a short drive from Kew and oppose the introduction of a daily parking charge.The journey by public transport is impractical.

It should be borne in mind that public transport in south London is fine for going to the centre, but very patchy and time consuming when travelling from one part of south London to another. We always travelled to Islington family record centre by public transport – via the centre to which links are good – but the removal of records to Kew meant using the car.

The closing of the FRC at Islington was already in my opinion a grave mistake – many people researchng family history are elderly people on low incomes. I happen to have a full subscription to ancestry.com to read records on line and I use it – but the web is no substitute for the “free” access one had in the past to index books, census films and local records at Islington. The pay per download from the NA is ridiculous since one cannot tell till one has read the document whether it is likely to be of use. The system at Scotland’s People is worse still, since part of one’s charge is forfeit unless used within a certain time and cannot be used unless one pays even more to access one’s own previous payments.

The whole point of research is that one must read through dozens of papers – and do it slowly and carefully – hoping to find the information one is looking for. I have done that in German archives as well as in Britain. Consistent reading of documents page after page demands free access to those documents by historians without the pressure of knowing one must pay page by page.

The changes proposeed at the NA do not seem to me conducive to careful scholarly historical research and I congratulate you on opposing them..

Hello. Please add my name to your petition against changes afoot at both local and national archives offices. I’m so cross I’m too incoherent to write an angry missive. They used to be called the Public Record Office, only now the public are to be denied access. The UK may be financially bankrupt, but these plans are set to make the nation educationally and intellectually bankrupt too. Every strength to your campaign.

Best wishes

Rosine

With respect to the eight points raised in the open letter to the Chief Exec, could I suggest submitting a freedom of information request to TNA asking them to supply the information that you have requested?

I fully support your campaign – at a time when family research has such a high profile and public interest, how can these proposals be made ?

May I try and inject a bit of weary realism into the debate? As an earlier poster predicted, the proposed 10% savings at TNA are already looking very modest in the context of the massive public spending cuts that all parties are finally talking about. The relationship that a body like TNA has with the Treasury is precarious in the extreme; politicians start with a limited sense of what it’s for; unlike other national heritage institutions like the British Museum and the British Library it is not partly shielded from the glare of the Treasury gaze by an overarching department like DCMS; and it is not, after all, quite the same sort of national heritage institution as them anyway. If we haven’t yet heard about cuts of a similar order at the BM or BL it is partly because they haven’t yet started jostling for space in the next Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) – or at least not so publicly. That is done at departmental level, and the BM has already found to its cost that a big capital project for which they were hoping to draw on DCMS funds has been left high and dry. As a department in its own right, TNA has greater autonomy but suffers more directly; for instance they had an underspend in 2007-8 which, in ordinary circumstances, they could have held over to 2008-9; but it was withdrawn under rules applying to the last year of the CSR cycle.
Regarding the specific cuts, there seem to be some misunderstandings around. As I understand it, although the consultation phase is not quite over and the full list of deleted posts not settled, records experts are not the ones who will bit hit hardest, if at all. The invaluable experts on medieval, early modern and modern documents will still be there. As for the closure on Mondays, it’s a real shame; I can’t imagine anyone wanted to do it, but when you remember that the old PRO (TNA’s predecessor) only went up to a 6-day week in 1997, it is less shocking. I started as a reader in Chancery Lane; I would never, in the 80s, have expected to have access on Saturdays as is now taken for granted. It would, in fact, have been cheaper for TNA to close on Saturdays than Mondays but I suspect it was politically untenable; Saturday brings a different sort of reader, those who can’t get there during the week, and for the Treasury diversity targets can be as important as financial ones.
I have read the ‘Counter Proposals’ for delivering 10% cuts on this website with interest. It starts clearly enough with some firm money-saving ideas, and then some proposals for somehow managing to continue offering six-day opening; I am not sure that the proposed reduction in opening hours and expert availability, spread over six days, would have met with less hostility than the neater and certainly more cost-effective reduction by one whole day. Then, a little disappointingly, the document becomes an outline plan for a different sort of TNA, without much explicit connection with reducing expenditure; it invokes constant reviews, directed as much towards establishing core roles as saving money; and some great income-generating ideas such as TNA moving into mass-market retail and becoming an academic body, which I love, but I do wonder what effect it would have on the working lives of the records experts who would also have to be teachers and supervisors, and on the finances when the attendant budgets referred to would be strictly reserved. It may well be that such a TNA would be a better one than the one we have, but whether it’s one that is attainable at present, or would make much more sense to those who hold the purse-strings, is a different question entirely.
This debate shows the massive degree of interest in and support for the activities catered for by TNA, whether academic research or genealogy or military history or any of the other areas in which it is the leading resource. Not all the supporters of these respective areas fully appreciate the others, of course: the barrage of criticism since July has included professional academics explaining the cuts as further evidence of TNA’s bias towards amateur family historians, while on this website and elsewhere one sometimes gets precisely the opposite reading of events. But underlying the criticism is presumably not just naked self-interest but some deep form of goodwill towards, if not the institution, then towards what it makes possible. From the point of view of the Friends of the National Archives, with whom I’m involved (though I must CLEARLY point out that I am writing this on my own behalf, not on that of the Friends or anyone else there), I really wish we could turn this goodwill to some constructive use in what is really, for TNA, a time of need. We try to raise funds to assist with cataloguing, digitization and other TNA projects; we provide volunteers who carry out much essential work in those and other areas, and though they are volunteers this incurs expenses for us; and we try to raise TNA’s profile and that of the records it holds, with (in part) the hope that people will remember that this is a heritage resource that, like all such resources, needs support. We are NOT a pressure group, either for or against TNA, so you can be a Friend and have any one of the spectrum of possible views of the institution and its management; there is, after all, no organization that will not do better with practical support and benefaction. At present our capability to offer this support and benefaction is modest. It would be a real tragedy if the current criticism of TNA drowned out the underlying goodwill now, when it is most needed. If you are interested in joining the Friends or helping in some other way, we would be delighted to hear from you: we’re at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/friends/.