Solutions · Local government

One retention schedule for every service the council runs

Housing, planning, social care and licensing each keep files for different lengths of time. XeresDocs holds them all to the council's schedule, in storage the council owns.

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DOCX Decision notice – 24/01187/FUL.docxPlanning · Applications · Record PLN-24-01187

Retention: Permanent, as the planning register
Access: Planning officers and the case's own team
Stored in: s3://yourcouncil-records-planning
Audit: Every view, download and change, kept in order

What councils need

Answer for every record, without moving any of them

Records stay in the council's tenancy. Files sit in the council's own Azure subscription or AWS account, in the UK region you choose.
Retention by service area. Each record type carries its schedule line, counted from the date that matters, such as closure or the end of a tenancy.
Disposal with a review. Records reaching their date are listed for approval, and destruction is recorded in an audit trail nobody can edit.
Legal hold for claims and inquiries. A hold stops disposal of a record until it is lifted, whatever its schedule says.
Find it for FOI and subject access. Search across every service area you are allowed to see, by person, reference or any field the record type defines.
Access follows the case. Rules grant a team the records whose fields name them, so a social worker sees their own cases and not the whole department.

Starting structure

A schedule you recognise on day one

New councils start from a structure like this one, then change anything to match their own schedule.

Department	Service area	Record type	Retention
Housing	Tenancy files	Tenancy	End of tenancy + 6 years
Planning	Applications	Planning application	Permanent
Children's services	Looked-after children	Child's case file	75 years from date of birth
Corporate services	Contracts	Contract	Expiry + 6 years
People	Employee files	Employee	Leaving + 6 years

Periods shown are examples. Your records manager sets the schedule, and XeresDocs enforces it.

Talk to us about your council's records

We'll show a service area of yours running on storage in your own tenancy.

Book a demo