The TaxPayers Alliance on the CRU and FOI

"CRU emails reveal inconvenient truths about FOI" - anyone would think the CRU had something to hide... There's plenty there but here's the best extract:

"On May 29th 2008, Prof Jones instructs colleagues to delete emails in a message helpfully titled "IPCC & FOI":

"Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."

AR4 is an IPCC report that Keith Briffa and others at the CRU worked on together, and at least one FoI request on exactly this correspondence had apparently been submitted by a David Holland on May 5th 2008.

The Freedom of Information Act 2000 expressly forbids - on pain of criminal conviction - destroying information that has been requested under FoI. As the Information Commissioner puts it:

If information is held when a FOIA request is received, destroying it outside of your normal records management policies will result in a breach of the Act. You must confirm that you hold the information and consider disclosure, subject to any exemption. It will also be a criminal offence to conceal or destroy information if this is done with the intention of preventing disclosure under either FOIA or EIR.

This offence is punishable with a fine of up to £5,000.

Tellingly, another email from Prof Jones later that year shows that UEA's internal FoI team had evidently become concerned about his secretive actions:

"I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn't be deleting emails"

If the FoI team were concerned that Prof Jones might be breaking the law - and even committing a criminal offence - on an area that they are legally responsible for, they should have reported him to the Information Commissioner. Perhaps his flowering relationship with the FoI officer and the Chief Librarian precluded this. "