No tamper-evident public archive infrastructure for evidence-grade records

The UK's defining records scandals are archive failures: Post Office Horizon, where corrupted evidence convicted hundreds, Windrush, where destroyed landing cards stripped citizens of status, inquiry disclosure fights, and the roughly 45 per cent of council accounts carrying disclaimed opinions. No UK public institution preserves evidence-grade records, inquiry evidence, court judgments, FOI corpora or procurement decisions, in tamper-evident, publicly verifiable form. The National Archives preserves without making records independently verifiable, and case law sits behind licensing friction. Durable, censorship-resistant archive protocols exist, content-addressed storage with cryptographic proofs of custody among them, and nothing connects them to UK public records.

Records are where UK accountability actually breaks: Horizon and Windrush each destroyed thousands of lives through corrupted or vanished records, and the state keeps proving it cannot be its own archivist.

A public-interest archive service anchoring hashes of inquiry evidence, judgments, contracts and FOI releases to tamper-evident storage with independent verification, piloted with one inquiry's evidence corpus or one council's records, run by a university and charity consortium, mechanism-agnostic on the underlying stack.

// Build now: First artefact: tamper-evident hash archive of one published inquiry evidence corpus; the council-records variant would need a partner.

No UK body keeps evidence-grade records tamper-evident despite Horizon and Windrush; the technology exists and the application is novel, unresourced and undated.