MILLIONS of e-mails to civil servants at the heart of government will be automatically wiped on Monday, 11 days before freedom of information laws come into force.

The Cabinet Office, which supports the Prime Minister and co-ordinates policy across government, has ruled that e-mails more than three months old must be deleted from December 20, The Times has learnt.

Its 2,000 civil servants are being told to print and file e-mails that should be disclosed under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act.

It will be up to the individual which e-mails are printed, with no monitoring from heads of department. Many officials, who receive about 100 e-mails a day, will have at least 3,000 items in their mailboxes. These include officials in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, the Delivery Unit, and the offices of Alan Milburn and Sir Andrew Turnbull, the Cabinet Secretary.

Although the deleted e-mails will be stored on back-up systems, these have been declared off limits to freedom of information requests because of the cost of accessing them.

Last night, Phil Boyd, the assistant information commmissioner, who will enforce FoI requests, said that the decision could be a big risk and that important files could be lost.

Constitutional experts called the introduction of an “opt-in” system, where civil servants are proactive in preserving information, a blatant contradiction of the Act’s “presumption of disclosure”.

The Tories said that the Government was deliberately trying to destroy embarrassing information. “This begs the question how much more does the Labour administration need to hide,” Michael Fabricant, the Shadow Minister for Industry and Technology, said.

The decision also raises questions about whether the trail of correspondence which brought down David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary, would have surfaced.

The Cabinet Office insisted that the exercise was not related to the Freedom of Information Act but was “good records management practice”, to stop files blocking the system.

“It is the end of the year and our computer system is getting overloaded,” he said. Most e-mails would be copied to a number of officials, and ministers’ private offices would ensure that important records were kept.

“We are not going to get some 25-year-old graduate deleting the advice which the Attorney-General gave to the Government about going to war with Iraq,” the official said.

The Department for Constitutional Affairs, which is monitoring the introduction of FoI legislation, said: “No Government Departments have been told to destroy records in order to prevent their release under the FoI Act, and such a policy would run totally contrary to the Government’s intention to increase openness.

“Departments regularly destroy records as part of proper records management policies. Paying to store outdated records which are no longer of any use, and which are not historically valuable, wastes taxpayers’ money.”

But freedom of information campaigners and opposition MPs called the decision extremely worrying. Alan Beith, the Liberal Democrat chairman of the Constitutional Affairs Committee, said: “This has the appearance of trying to get round the new freedom of information legislation. It certainly appears that they are not observing the spirit of the Act. The FoI legislation was meant to result in a change of culture, not a wholesale clear-out.”

Mr Boyd said: “The risk is that you’re applying a deletion policy on the basis of the age of the record, rather than the information which it contains. The policy should not automatically decide that after three months a record has no value, but at that point someone must decide whether to keep it.”

WHAT OFFICIALS MUST KEEP

Civil servants are told that they do need to keep e-mails containing:

Actions the department has taken to comply with legal obligations

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