Corporate retention schedule

The general data protection regulation (GDPR) states that the council should not hold personal data longer than is absolutely necessary. Our corporate retention schedule tells you how long we keep the records we work with, what we do with them at the end of that time, and the reasons why we do those things.

The schedule applies to all documents we keep as a record of the council’s actions and contacts with the public and staff. It covers records in all formats, paper or electronic, including emails, letters, photographs, databases, spreadsheets, recordings – even informal telephone messages if they are a record of a significant conversation.

There are three ways to find types of record:

• Look for a word that you might use to describe what the record contains in Record name and content
• Or choose from the drop-down list of Functions – that is the council’s activities
• Or choose from the drop-down list of Directorates – that will list the records created by staff in each directorate. There is an ‘all staff’ option for records kept in many departments.

You can narrow your search by using more than one of these options.

• How long we keep or retain each type of record and the date from when that period of time should start. For example, that might be when the record was created, when a task was completed or when the record became out-of-date.
• What we do with paper records at the end of the retention period: Destruction of paper records containing personal data is through a confidential waste system.
  • What we do with electronic records at the end of the retention period: Not all our current IT systems allow us to delete records permanently.  We are working towards improving them, but in the meantime data which should be deleted will be treated so staff cannot access it.
• The laws or regulations that decide the retention period.

If you find an error in this list, or know of a type of record which we keep that is not on it, please contact the Data Protection Officer, DataProtection@portsmouthcc.gov.uk or the Modern Records Supervisor via Modern Records (ModernRecords@portsmouthcc.gov.uk)