Retention and Destruction of Records

1. Retention of Documentation

All records, including files, records, photographs, floppy disks and other written or electronic and visual material that originates in connection with social work duties, are the property of the Council.

All new information created or received for a customer must be kept in electronic form, Initially on LCS (see Liquidlogic Children's System and Livelink Guidance) and then on Livelink when that has been deployed.

It is the Case Worker's responsibility for any information created or received to be uploaded to the appropriate system

Under no circumstances should the materials referred to above be retained in an employee's possession, whether at home or elsewhere.

Staff using computers at home for Council purposes must transfer any material to an office computer by the next working day. Subsequently, all material must be immediately deleted from their personal computer, hard drive or floppy disks. No information should be retained that can identify any customer or service user.

Staff are not allowed to remove case records from their office, whether this is to work at home or for meetings, except as agreed on a case-by-case basis by the line manager.

Any authorisations to remove case records from the office may be cancelled at any time and their return requested at any time, although reasons should always be given.

Any files removed from the Central filing area or passed between social care staff must be marked out to an individual worker. The marking out of a file must be recorded on TRIM.

The worker the file has been marked out to is responsible for the file until it is returned to a Central file area.

All new customer paper files must be registered on Trim

Any breach of these arrangements may lead to disciplinary action being taken.

2. Destruction of Files

Please see the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse letter local authorities on 9 July 2015 advising against the deletion of potentially relevant documents.

Click here to view a table record retention timescales.

Records are only to be destroyed by the Records Management Service.

Before destruction checks will be made that there is no outstanding litigation, claim or subject access request. If there is the record will not be destroyed.

When records identified for destruction are destroyed, a register of such records will be kept on Trim (in the case of paper records) or Livelink (in the case of Electronic records)

In all cases, the destruction of paper records should be coordinated with the deletion of any electronic corresponding records.