Guidance for Local Returning Officers administering a Police and Crime Commissioner election in England and Wales

You should maintain a document retention policy. You should ensure that you do not retain documents for longer than the period specified in your document retention policy and that they are securely destroyed at the appropriate point.

Your document retention policy should set out the following for all documents you receive and hold:

• whether the document contains personal data
• the lawful basis on which any personal data was collected (see ‘Lawful basis for processing’ in our data protection guidance)
• your retention period
• your rationale for the retention period

You can find more information in our data protection guidance for Electoral Registration Officers and Returning Officers. 

In some cases this will be straightforward since electoral legislation will require a set period for which documents are retained, you can find a list of these documents here. In other cases, you will need to make a local decision and justify this in your document retention policy.

Our data protection guidance contains further information on the storage of personal data and on document retention.
 

Election documents

You must forward the required election documents to the relevant officer, who is legally responsible for keeping them.1 The relevant registration officer is either:

• the ERO of the local authority which contains the voting area
• if the voting area includes more than one local authority, the ERO of the local authority who has the greater or greatest (as the case may be) number of registered electors 

If you are not also the relevant registration officer, you must securely forward the documents to them.

The one year period that the documents must be stored for, starts from the date the ERO2  receives them.

You should liaise with them at an early stage to put in place arrangements for the forwarding of the prescribed documents after the declarations of results. You should ensure that all of the documentation is kept secure and accounted for during the process of being forwarded to the relevant ERO.

Election notices published on your website

You will need to consider whether it is appropriate or necessary for the various election notices published on your website to remain there beyond the expiry of the petition period for the election.

Where each notice serves a specific purpose, i.e. advising who will be a candidate at the election, once the election is over, and the opportunity to question that election has passed, they serve no further purpose. You should either remove such notices published on your website, or remove the personal data contained in these notices, once the petition deadline for that election has passed.

Data protection legislation does permit personal data to be stored for longer periods if the data will be processed solely for archiving purposes in the public interest, or for scientific, historical, or statistical purposes and subject to the implementation of appropriate safeguards. For election results, for example, you should retain these on your website as they are for public interest and historical and statistical purposes.

Home address forms

The home address form is kept by the PARO and must be kept securely stored for a period of 21 working days after the day the result was declared.

Return of equipment

You should make arrangements to return any equipment, such as the polling booths, to storage.

During this process you should conduct an audit of your equipment, identifying any damaged items for repair or disposal. This will enable you to plan for any replacements you may need to purchase for future polls.