Element 5 - Retention Schedules

For evidence please refer to the appendices below.

Element 5. Retention and disposal schedules 

The Council has a retention and disposal schedule in place.  It was created with discussions with services about their professional, legal, audit and business requirements and with reference to existing guidance. The retention schedule was used as one of the reference guides for the Scottish Council for Archives generic retention and disposal schedules.

It is available for staff on the Council intranet under Reference/Records Management.

The basic unit of record keeping is the electronic or paper document set, file or folder. These are hierarchical groupings bringing like information together related to a particular function, process or activity.

Decisions about records will be made about the file rather than individual records within the set, files or folders wherever possible.  It is acknowledged that some files will contain records with different retentions and service staff will advise on this.

The retention schedule is currently undergoing a comprehensive review as in future Records will be stored and managed in the corporate EDRMS which handles retention and disposal using workflow. The retention schedule will be based on the Council classification scheme and arranged by Function, Activity and Transaction.

The introduction of a central corporate scanning unit means that in future paper will only be retained for 3 – 6 months according to the service level agreements and will be destroyed at this time once quality assurance checks have been undertaken.  The scanning is done to the standard required for legal evidence. Where services have a requirement to retain the paper for legal, audit or business purposes this is noted in the agreement.

Appendix 8 – Record retention schedule, 2018 revision (PDF)
Appendix 9 - Procurement record retention schedule, 2011 (PDF)
Appendix 10 – Introduction to the record retention schedule (PDF)
Appendix 11 - Scanning Guidelines, 2017 (PDF)