A Look into UK Record Retention Policies

Every company deals with paperwork one way or another regardless of what products they sell or what services they offer. The difference lies in the amount of paperwork they have to file and store in on-site or off-site storage facilities; a five-year-old health care facility, for example, will naturally have more files to keep than a newly opened pastry shop. Still, every record serves a purpose to an organisation—whether they are employee information records or bookkeeping records.

The real question is whether these records are still relevant or past their prime. Some records are vital during tax auditing or any legal process, thus, they must be kept for as long as they are useful. However, assessing a document's importance can be difficult, which is why policies on record retention were established—to give businesses a clear idea on how long they should keep certain files and when it is the right time to dispose of some.

Personnel administration files, for instance, like copies of employee contracts must be disposed of six years after termination or resignation of an employee. Meanwhile, income tax form P60 (a complete and accurate record of all payments made to an employee) must be kept for six years, while employees must retain their tax records 22 months after the current tax year. Corporate insurance policies must be permanently retained and stored in a secure document storage facility.