Dear Constituent,
Thank you for contacting me about the Mountbatten Papers.
Before Earl Mountbatten retired as Chief of the Defence Staff in 1965, he agreed that his personal diaries could not be put into the public domain without first being vetted. Earl Mountbatten also made clear that ownership of all these papers would be handed over to the Broadlands Trustees. In 1969, the Broadlands Trustees entered into undertakings not to give general or particular access to these papers with the express permission of the Prime Minister of the day through the Cabinet Secretary.
In line with this agreement, the Cabinet Office is continuing to work with the University of Southampton, who currently own the Mountbatten family papers, to support the release of the Mountbatten archive whilst ensuring sensitive and official information is handled appropriately and in line with the Freedom of Information Act and Data Protection Act.
More broadly, I am glad that 99.8 per cent of the Broadlands Archives, which consist of 4,500 boxes, is publicly available and accessed regularly by researchers globally as an invaluable historic resource.
Thank you again for contacting me.
