Introduce mandatory back up of all phones of all senior officials and ministers, allowing continuously back up all communications to cloud storage. We think this will ensure that important communications are available to future inquiries, regardless of events such as the loss or theft of a phone.

Over the past years, ministers and senior officials have claimed they have lost their phone immediately before an important inquiry. It is also a common practice to use "disappearing messages" features of chat apps to destroy messages shortly after they are sent. In our view these practices severely erode trust in the government and the civil service. Regardless of which app is used for ministerial chats, we think these should be continuously and safely backed up to the cloud so that a proper record is kept.