Official records to be public after 20 years

Family historians will get access to public records after 20 years old, instead of 30, from next year.

The government has confirmed it will change how quickly public records are made available at The National Archives from 30 to 20 years. This change will be phased over the next ten years. From 2013, two years’ worth of government records will need to be transferred to The National Archives over until the new ‘20-year rule’ is reached in 2023. After this point, government will revert to transferring a single year’s worth of 20 year old records to The National Archives each year.

This change will affect some 3.3m records, of which only a small proportion will be selected for permanent preservation. This could result in an additional, 45,000 records (90,000 records per year) transferred to The National Archives each year of the 10-year transition, requiring 10 kilometres extra of shelving to store them.

Currently, the government plans to implement the same change for public records held at 116 local authorities from 2015. However, this is subject to a full impact and cost assessment.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2012 at 9:50 am and is filed under Events, New Records, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.