Row over ex-Bristol mayor’s deleted emails prompts calls for big changes at council

Conservatives are demanding big changes to how Bristol City Council keeps vital information after it emerged that all of ex-mayor Marvin Rees’s official emails were deleted after he left office. Tory group deputy leader Cllr Graham Morris has tabled a golden motion – meaning it must be debated at a full council meeting next week – calling for inboxes of key decision-makers to be retained and their deletion to be extended from the current 30 days to four years, spanning a full stretch between local elections.

In October it was revealed that the former Labour mayor’s email account had been wiped, sparking alarm from councillors and local political activists. In a confusing answer at the time, council leader Cllr Tony Dyer (Green, Southville) and director of legal services Tim O’Gara said the authority’s document retention policy was to delete email accounts just one month after members or officers left because they were not the organisation’s recognised storage system.

However, they said the information was held elsewhere and would be available to share via Freedom of Information (FOI) requests if it was not exempt from publication. Now Cllr Morris (Conservative, Stockwood) is demanding much more transparency and better record keeping involving council leaders and top officers who make decisions.

Ahead of full council on Tuesday, December 10, he said: “I was very surprised and disappointed to discover that emails of key officials and decision-makers within Bristol City Council are not stored in such a way as to allow easy retrieval or accessibility. The law and regulatory authorities already provide certain safeguards against disclosure for different types or categories of information.

“For example, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has an extensive list of exemptions for things involving confidential personal content and matters around commercial sensitivity. No doubt our existing data handling policy fully complies with all of the existing legal rules, requirements, and obligations.

“However, these days, emails almost certainly constitute a primary means of everyday contact. Consequently, I think the authority should be doing more to allow retrieval and access to this important medium for FOIs and Subject Access Requests.

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“Reform would also allow better standardisation of its document storage archive. This latest incident – with its rather artificial limitations and rather obfuscatory outcome – actually provides us with an opportunity to update local practices and become an exemplar of transparency and accountability as a public body.

“I hope our proposals command majority support when they come to be debated at the next full council.” His motion said the 30-day “artificial time limit is clearly unsatisfactory and antithetical to the needs of efficiency and transparency”.

“Therefore, the current negative categorisation or status around email storage needs to be changed,” it said. “Confidence in our public institutions depends upon timely and accurate responses to legitimate enquiries – subject to lawful exemptions and safeguards pertaining to confidentiality and commercial sensitivity.”

The proposal is asking councillors to call on the chief executive to invite the ICO to provide support and oversight of retrieval attempts made to locate electronic records of senior figures in the previous Labour administration. It asks for a review and an overhaul of how the organisation retains information and correspondence and to produce a “comprehensive and clear list of the types of documents or forms of information exchange that are archived and where these are kept”.