1 - Thread on the Home Office destroying the #Windrush landing cards. Here's how the system should work. Under the Public Records Act, govmt departments must transfer archive records to @UkNatArchives within 30 (now 20) years.
2 - if departments want to keep records for longer than this, as the Home Office did for these papers (until 2010), they must submit a 'retention application form', setting out the reasons why the records need to be retained in the department and not sent to @UkNatArchives.
3 - That retention application is considered by an independent body of historians, archivists and so on (on which for seven years I used to sit). Therefore, there should at some point have been a retention application made for the Windrush disembarkation papers.
4 - I can assure you that the body, called the Advisory Council on Public Records, would have been well attuned to the value of a historical set of records relating to the Windrush generation.
5 - The Home Office says the Windrush records were destroyed 'under the Data Protection Act', because departments are not supposed to keep records containing personal data for longer than that data is necessary. But this is nonsense.
6 - 1st, the Data Protection Act relates primarily to records created post 2000. 2nd, the records were still being used, and of value to the people whose information they contained. 3rd, there is a clear exemption in the Act for material of historical value.
7 - As @UkNatArchives makes clear, personal data should only be destroyed as part of the retention process, not ad hoc. There is no way the Advisory Council, or indeed anyone with half a brain, would have sanctioned the destruction of the Windrush papers. nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/info… 
8 - So to conclude: a) I cannot understand how records of this importance were destroyed; b) there will be a paper trail setting out who did it, and why; c) the government's record management system is not fit for purpose (which is why I resigned from the Council).
PS - one day I'll tell you about the time the Cabinet Office told porkies in order to keep the Profumo Enquiry papers secret. I fought for months to make the papers open, but sadly lost - they're closed till 2048.
