Retention: how long to keep what

A compliance archive that keeps everything forever is almost as hard to use as one that keeps nothing. When every email, draft and superseded certificate sits alongside the current record, the document a regulator asks for first is buried under fifteen that no longer matter. The skill in records management is not hoarding. It is knowing what has to live for the life of the building, what has to live for a fixed legal period, and what can be retired once it is superseded.

That judgement is harder than it looks, because retention is not one rule. It is a patchwork of statutory minimums, contractual expectations, limitation periods and plain operational common sense, and the right answer differs by document type.

Three reasons a document earns its keep

Before setting any period, it helps to be clear about why you are keeping a given record at all. Most fall into one of three groups.

• Statutory or regulatory minimum. A law or regulator sets a period, or implies one by requiring you to be able to produce the record on demand.
• The golden thread. For higher-risk buildings, certain information is meant to persist for the life of the building as an accurate, up-to-date digital record held through design, construction and occupation. The golden thread, as defined in the Building Safety Act 2022 regime, is not a retention period at all. It is a duty to keep the current truth available indefinitely.
• Evidence in case of dispute or claim. Limitation periods and the practical need to defend a decision mean some records are worth keeping well beyond the moment they stop being operationally live.

A document can sit in more than one group, and you keep it for the longest reason that applies.

What changes for higher-risk buildings

For an occupied higher-risk building, retention stops being a question of archiving and becomes a question of currency. Under the Building Safety Act 2022, the Accountable Person, or Principal Accountable Person where there are several, must hold a safety case and produce a safety case report for the Building Safety Regulator. The golden thread that supports it is meant to be live, structured and available, not boxed up after handover.

That reframes the whole exercise. The fire risk assessment, the floor and building plans, the external wall information, the major works records, the structural information: for an HRB these are not files you retain for a period and then weed. They are the building's current state of knowledge, and the question is whether the version you hold is the right one, not whether you are still allowed to throw it away. A safety case that depends on superseded plans is a weaker case even where nothing was technically discarded too soon.

A working retention table

The periods below are a starting framework, not legal advice, and several depend on the building, the tenure and the contract. Where a figure comes from the regulatory position we have named it; where it does not, treat the entry as operational practice and confirm it against your own obligations and the live rules before acting.

The figures named against electrical and lift records come from the gov.uk landlord rules and the HSE LOLER guidance respectively, and set how often the inspection happens rather than a fixed shred date; keep enough history to show the cadence was met.

Retiring records is a decision, not a default

The temptation is to keep everything because deleting feels risky. But an archive nobody can search is a liability of a different kind, and data-protection principles push the other way for anything holding personal data, where minimisation matters. The answer is to make retirement a deliberate, recorded act: who decided, on what basis, and when. A weeding decision that is itself logged is defensible. A record that simply vanished is not.

This is where a system earns its place over a filing cabinet. When certificates, assessments and plans live in a structured register with their own dates and statuses, retention can be applied as a rule rather than a memory, and the current version is always the one that surfaces first. Pair that with a compliance calendar and the records that must be renewed get renewed before they lapse, so retention is about history rather than firefighting.

Start with the current truth

If you do nothing else, get clear on which records represent the building as it is today, and protect those above all. Everything else, the history and the drafts, can be organised around them. A practical way in is to read this alongside our note on what to keep and what to let go in a compliance archive: together they turn retention from an anxiety into a set of decisions you can actually make and stand behind.