Thirty-year rule

The "thirty-year rule" is the popular name given to a law in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and Australia that provides that the yearly cabinet papers of a government will be released publicly thirty years after they were created.

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, the Public Records Act 1958 states 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 in effect two quite distinct 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 such time unless they were deemed likely to cause "damage to the country's image, national security or foreign relations" if they were to be released.