There’s a handover date. A removal team booked for Friday. A new lease that needs signing before you can even get the keys. Somewhere in the middle of all that, someone has to work out what to do with fifteen years of archived files sitting in the basement or the storage cupboard nobody’s opened since 2019.
Documents are usually the last thing anyone thinks about during a move or a closure. That’s exactly when they get lost, damaged, or thrown out without anyone checking whether they were still legally required to keep them.
Why Moves and Closures Create Document Risk
A move is chaotic by nature. Boxes get mixed up. Files that should have gone to secure storage end up in a skip because nobody labelled them properly. Confidential paperwork ends up in general waste because the removal team didn’t know it was sensitive, and nobody checked afterwards.
The bigger problem is the lack of an audit trail. If a client or regulator asks what happened to a set of records six months after the move, “we think they went in one of the vans” isn’t an answer anyone wants to give.
For businesses closing down entirely, there’s an extra layer. Legal retention obligations don’t end just because the company stops trading. Someone still has to be responsible for those records, even after the office is empty and the sign’s come down.
Legal Obligations Don’t Stop When You Move
Changing premises or ceasing to trade doesn’t reset the clock on your legal duties.
HMRC requires tax records to be kept for six years from the end of the relevant tax year. This applies even if the company has been dissolved. Companies Act records carry their own retention periods, and directors remain on the hook for making sure those are met.
If you’re in a regulated sector like legal, healthcare, or financial services, the retention requirements attached to your records survive the closure of the business that created them. The records don’t stop being sensitive just because the company that generated them no longer exists. Somebody has to keep looking after them.
Planning a Move: What to Sort Out Before You Pack
Audit What You Have
Before a single box goes anywhere, you need a clear picture of what records exist and where they’re kept. This doesn’t have to be a forensic exercise. It needs to be thorough enough to sort records by type, age, and retention requirement, so you’re not making decisions blind on moving day.
Separate Active from Archive
Not everything needs to travel with you. Records you use regularly should go to the new office. Records you’re required to keep but rarely touch are better suited to offsite storage, where they’re safe and out of the way instead of taking up a filing room you’re paying rent on.
Check Retention Dates
A move is a natural point to review what you can get rid of. If something has passed its retention date, this is the moment to schedule secure destruction rather than pay to transport it somewhere it doesn’t need to be.
Arrange Secure Transport
Confidential files in the back of a removal van, alongside desks and office plants, isn’t a serious answer to GDPR compliance. Records containing personal or commercial data need to move in a way that’s tracked and secure, with a clear record of who handled them and when. If something goes missing, you need to be able to show what steps you took, not just say you meant well.
Closing a Business: Who Holds the Records?
Dissolving a company doesn’t make the responsibility for its records disappear. It just changes whose problem it is.
Directors remain responsible for ensuring legal retention requirements are met, even after the business has been wound up. If a liquidator is involved, they’ll typically oversee what happens to the records as part of winding up the company’s affairs, including decisions about what can be destroyed and when.
Tax records and Companies Act documents carry retention rules that outlast the business itself. That leaves a practical question that gets overlooked surprisingly often: once there’s no office left, where do these records actually go? Someone still needs a physical or arranged storage solution, even for a company that technically no longer exists.
Offsite Storage as a Transition Solution
Whether you’re moving, restructuring, or closing down, offsite archive storage is a practical way to deal with records you’re required to keep but can’t sensibly hold onto in your new setup, or that have no home at all once the office closes.
Managed storage gives you flexibility during a period when very little else feels certain. You’re not committing to a new filing room in a new lease. You’re not relying on a director’s spare room to hold six years of tax paperwork. Retrieval still works even when the records are offsite, so if you need something back, you’re not left waiting weeks.
And when the retention period does eventually run out, destruction can be scheduled properly, with a record of what was destroyed and when. That’s one less thing to remember three years down the line.
Get This Sorted Before You Hand Back the Keys
If you’re in the middle of a move or working through a closure and need a plan for your document archive, Ardington Archives can help. We offer managed storage, consultancy, and confidential destruction, all handled under one arrangement so you’re not coordinating three different suppliers on top of everything else. Have a look at our Secure Archive Environments page, or get in touch before that handover date arrives.
