Deidre Brock MP, Shadow SNP Spokesperson for Environment and Rural Affairs asked the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
“For what reason the archive files relating to Britain’s nuclear weapons and atomic energy programmes were withdrawn from the National Archives by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority in 2018.”
Richard Harrington MP, Parliamentary under-secretary of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy responded on behalf of the government stating “The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, working in collaboration with colleagues from the Ministry of Defence and the Atomic Weapons Establishment, is undertaking a security review of nuclear information records in the archives at Kew. As part of the review process, a collection of records (including many relating to the early development of military and civil nuclear technology) has been temporarily withdrawn from general access. At this stage, it is still unclear how long the review will take, but the NDA does anticipate that many of the documents will be restored to the public archive in due course. In the meantime, archived material can be requested through Freedom of Information access requests.”