SNP minister admits WhatsApps messages are automatically deleted daily
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The SNP’s Freedom of Information minister has admitted that his WhatsApp messages are automatically deleted every day, moments after boasting about the Scottish Government’s “transparency”.
George Adam, the Scottish parliamentary business minister, said there had been a “vast improvement” in the proportion of Freedom of Information (FoI) requests answered on time over the past two years.
Mr Adam said the SNP Government “does believe in openness and transparency”, despite evidence presented to the Covid Inquiry showing that some ministers and civil servants deleted all their informal messages dating from the pandemic.
But his boasts backfired after he was challenged about his own practices in a BBC Radio Scotland interview, which was conducted over a WhatsApp call.
The interviewer said: “When we were setting up this call, we had this notification flash up saying George Adam uses a default timer for disappearing messages in new chats. New messages will disappear from this chat 24 hours after they’re sent.”
Asked why he was automatically deleting his messages, the minister said he did not use WhatsApp for parliamentary business but admitted he did for communicating with his private office. He said any relevant points in the messages would be transferred to the Scottish Government’s official record before they were deleted.
This was the same defence used by Nicola Sturgeon, the former first minister, when she tried to justify to the inquiry deleting all her WhatsApp messages dating from the pandemic.
Mr Adam said: “Basically, I don’t use WhatsApp for business, parliamentary business in any shape or form. What I do use WhatsApp for is for information, like my private office will get in touch with me and talk to me ‘you’re being late for a meeting, George’, ‘you’ve got meeting in five minutes’, things like that.
“But any information on that chat will be retained and put into the Scottish Government system.”
Mr Adam’s intervention came after Scotland’s information commissioner announced at the weekend that he was launching an inquiry into the mass deletion of WhatsApp messages in the Scottish Government.
Craig Hoy, the chairman of the Scottish Tories, said: “It was both embarrassing and telling that the SNP Government’s information minister was forced to admit that he too automatically deletes his WhatsApp messages.
”At the same time he insisted, presumably with a straight face, that his party and government are committed to openness and transparency.
“Like Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney, he claimed that social media is never used for decision-making purposes – something which the Covid Inquiry exposed as simply untrue.”
Mr Adam insisted WhatsApp was not used “as a decision-making process” despite messages presented to the inquiry showing Ms Sturgeon using the platform to discuss lockdown rules during the pandemic.
He said he was “quite happy” to discuss Mr Hamilton’s proposals with him and pointed out that Humza Yousaf had ordered an external review into the use of informal messaging in light of the evidence heard at the inquiry.
