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

The UK's defining records scandals are archive failures: Post Office Horizon (corrupted evidence convicting hundreds), Windrush (landing cards destroyed, citizens stripped of status), inquiry disclosure fights, and ~45% of council accounts carrying disclaimed opinions. Yet no UK public institution preserves evidence-grade records (inquiry evidence, court judgments, FOI corpora, procurement decisions) in tamper-evident, publicly verifiable form. The National Archives preserves but does not make records independently verifiable; case law sits behind licensing friction. Durable, censorship-resistant archive protocols exist (content-addressed storage with cryptographic proofs of custody exist), but 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. 'There is no political power without control of the archive', 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-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 but the application is novel, unresourced, and carries no dated trigger.