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.
claims & evidence · 4
// each factual claim in this entry, its source, and when it was last checked. Unresolved attributions are flagged rather than hidden. Challenge any of them on the thread below.
- 212.1verifiedchecked 2026-10-08In the Horizon scandal, corrupted evidence convicted hundreds of postmasters.Hamilton v Post Office [2021] EWCA Crim 577 quashed 39 convictions and called the prosecutions an affront to justice; the Horizon IT Inquiry's 2025 first volume documents the human impact.
- 212.2verifiedchecked 2026-10-08In the Windrush scandal, destroyed landing cards stripped citizens of status.Wendy Williams's review, the canonical account of the destroyed registry slips and their consequences.
- 212.3verifiedchecked 2026-10-08Roughly 45 per cent of council accounts carry disclaimed opinions.Reconciled with claim 66.3: the 2023/24 final backstop produced 47.1 per cent disclaimed, the 2024/25 round 41.5 per cent. The entry's roughly 45 per cent sits between the two rounds and stands.
- 212.4verifiedchecked 2026-07-07The National Archives preserves records without making them independently verifiable, case law sits behind licensing friction, and no UK public institution keeps evidence-grade records in tamper-evident, publicly verifiable form.Absence claim. Checked TNA's digital preservation documentation, which covers integrity internally rather than public verifiability, and the Find Case Law licence, whose terms restrict computational re-use.