Twenty-Two Meetings, No Minutes. The Group Is Officially ‘A Conversation.’
The group has met twenty-two times since 2023 and produced no minutes, because eleven days after a transparency rule commenced somebody renamed it. Estates keeps a room-booking log, which carries no exemption, and released it in nine days.
LONDON, United Kingdom — Twenty-two meetings. One room. Forty-six hours and ten minutes of senior official time, and eleven trays of sandwiches.
That is the surviving record of a group which has coordinated policy across four departments for a decade, and it is a facilities record, because rooms are booked and sandwiches are invoiced.
The minutes do not exist. We asked for them on 6 May and were told, accurately, that no recorded information is held.
The refusal was correct
A department can only give you what it has. The reply we received claimed no exemption and argued no harm. It said the group is not a committee, not a board and not a working group, that it generates no formal record, and that there is accordingly nothing to disclose.
We checked that against the group's terms of reference, two pages, released without argument. They describe a body that "convenes officials at deputy-director level and above to align departmental positions ahead of decision points", and they end by noting that the standing conversation takes no decisions.
The department's covering letter put it more plainly. The group is not a committee. It is a conversation.
Estates has no exemption
Rooms in the building are booked through the estates directorate, which keeps a ledger because it bills departments for the space and for the catering.
That ledger is a facilities record. No policy exemption reaches it, because nobody drafting a policy exemption was thinking about furniture.
We asked on 19 May and had it on 28 May. Nine days, no fee, two catering staff names redacted.
The log begins on 1 January 2023. Twenty-two rows, the first of them 19 April. Room 4.11 on all twenty-two. Median duration two hours five minutes; median attendance nine; the longest run four hours forty minutes on 3 October 2024, which is also the only day anybody ordered a hot lunch.
Eleven days
The date that matters is not in the log.
A transparency rule commenced on 11 March 2019. It requires minutes to be published within twenty working days by any body whose name contains the words committee, board or working group.
On 22 March 2019 the Cross-Departmental Working Group was renamed the Standing Conversation.
The memo doing it was refused at first instance and released to us on internal review on 17 June. It is one page, signed by a grade 7, Bronwen Achterberg-Idowu, and unlike most documents of its kind it gives a reason.
Minute-writing, it says, was consuming "approximately forty hours a month" from a secretariat of five.
Forty hours a month
Forty hours across five people is one person's week, every month, spent producing an account of a meeting for the benefit of people who had all been at it.
That is a real cost, and it is the cost the memo names. It is also the department's own figure, shown without working. We could not test it: the memo describes a group meeting monthly, and on the surviving log it meets about every seven weeks.
It is not concealment. It is a saving with a concealing effect, which from outside the building is the same shape, and the shape is what a reader ends up looking at.
Ms Achterberg-Idowu's reply runs unedited at the foot of this page. This desk thinks it is better than the story above it, and it contains the sentence we would have led on if we had thought of it first.
What is already gone
Under a published retention schedule, estates destroys a booking three years after the end of the calendar year it falls in. The sweep runs each December; the one in December 2025 took everything up to the end of 2022. That is why the file opens on a January.
Twenty-two is therefore not the number of times this group has met. It is the number of times it has met recently enough that the billing system has not yet forgotten. The three years and nine months between the renaming and that sweep exist nowhere either of us can reach: no minutes, because none were written; no bookings, because the schedule ran on time.
We asked whether the retention schedule had been considered when the group was renamed. The department said it had not, and we believe that, because the two things are run by people who have never met each other.
What this desk takes from it
Professor Tomas Lindqvist-Nnamdi, who studies publication duties, has counted nineteen bodies renamed within ninety days of the 2019 commencement. He will not say that any of them was renamed because of it, and neither will we.
What can be said is narrower and duller. A duty that attaches to a word in a title will be answered by changing the word in the title, and here the change took eleven days and was written down.
The record that survived was the one nobody wrote for publication. Estates was not keeping a transparency file. Estates was keeping a bill.
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Sources & Method
We asked for minutes, were told none exist, and believed it. Then we asked which directorate bills the departments for the room and the sandwiches, and asked that directorate for its ledger, which no policy exemption had been drafted to cover. The renaming memo came separately, on internal review, and it is the memo rather than the log that made this item worth printing.
Who we spoke to
- Estates directorate room-booking log, January 2023 – June 2026, Obtained under freedom of information. Requested 19 May 2026; released 28 May 2026; no fee, two names redacted May 2026 Published in full with this item, including the catering lines.
- Renaming memorandum, 22 March 2019, Released on internal review. Refused at first instance; released 17 June 2026 after internal review June 2026 One page. The reason it gives is the reason we have printed.
- Bronwen Achterberg-Idowu, Signatory of the renaming memorandum; then a grade 7 in the secretariat. Written questions, then a fifty-minute telephone call; replied in writing July 2026 Her reply is printed unedited and is the best thing on this page.
- Prof. Tomas Lindqvist-Nnamdi, Studies administrative record-keeping and publication duties. Interviewed by video call 3 July 2026 Has counted nineteen bodies renamed within ninety days of the 2019 commencement. Cautions that he cannot show intent for any of them.
What we could not confirm
- What is said in the room. We have twenty-two dates, twenty-two durations and twenty-two attendance counts. We have not established a single sentence spoken at any of the meetings, and nothing in this item should be read as a claim about their content.
- Whether the renaming was prompted by the rule. The memo is dated eleven days after commencement and does not mention the rule. Eleven days is a striking interval and a striking interval is not a motive.
- How many meetings were held between the renaming and the end of 2022. Those bookings were destroyed on schedule. The number may be larger than twenty-two, may be smaller, and is now unrecoverable by us or by the department.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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The Meridian TelegraphTHE MEETINGS THAT DO NOT EXIST
Ran the absence of minutes as evidence of a hidden second government inside the four departments.
Had that we did not
The refusal letter, quoted accurately and at length.
Left out
The renaming memo, which was on the department's own disclosure log three weeks before their piece, and which gives a reason.
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The Continental WireDepartment Says No Minutes Are Held By Cross-Departmental Body
Reported the refusal and the department's characterisation of it, in that order, and stopped.
Had that we did not
The department's statement in full.
Left out
That a second record of the same meetings exists in another directorate of the same building and is available on request.
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They Buriedthis newspaperTwenty-Two Meetings, No Minutes. The Group Is Officially ‘A Conversation.’
Asked a different directorate for a record nobody had thought to exempt, and printed the reason for the renaming alongside it.
Had that we did not
The log, the memo, and the signatory's reply, which is better than our story.
Left out
We printed the catering in the second paragraph and the retention schedule in the eleventh. The sandwiches are the funniest thing in the log and the least important; the schedule destroyed four years of this record and got a shrug. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Bronwen Achterberg-Idowu, signatory of the 2019 renaming memorandum on 22 June 2026 in writing, with the memo and the log attached, and no deadline. Replied on 9 July 2026 after a fifty-minute telephone call. Printed in full and unedited, at her request.
I signed it. I have not been asked about it in seven years and I would rather answer than have it described for me.
You have written that the renaming had a concealing effect. That is fair and I am not going to argue with it. What I would like on the record is what was concealed, because you have not seen it and I have.
Our minutes were four pages. Page one was the room, the date and the attendance. Pages two to four were the agenda items with the word noted after each of them. That was not laziness. That was what you write when you know the document is going to be published in twenty working days and the people in the room have to keep working with each other afterwards. A publication duty does not make a record honest. It makes a record that was written to be published, which is a different object with the same name.
So the trade was this. Under the rule we would have produced, every month, four pages saying nothing, at a cost of about forty hours from a team of five. That is one person's entire week, every month, transcribing agreement. Without the rule we produce nothing, and the people in the room speak more plainly than they did in 2018. I made that trade at grade 7 with no legal advice and I would make it again, and I accept that nobody voted for it.
On your log, I want to say something you may not expect. It is a better record than my minutes were. It tells you the meetings are real, that they run two hours, that nine people give up a morning, that the four departments keep coming back. You have obtained a record of who ate lunch. The minutes would have told you less.
What I would ask you to print is that the fix is not shouting at me. The fix is a duty that attaches to a function rather than to a word in a title, and until somebody writes that, every group in this building that is told to publish will simply stop being the thing that has to. It is not a committee. It is a conversation. Somebody wrote that sentence, and it happens to be true, and that is the whole problem.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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