Ministry of Justice plan to destroy historical wills is ‘insane’, say experts
www.theguardian.com
Department hopes to save £4.5m a year by digitising – then binning – about 100m wills that date back 150 years

UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals “insane” say experts::Department hopes to save £4.5m a year by digitising – then binning – about 100m wills that date back 150 years

  • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
    43·
    11 months ago

    Maintaining and keeping 500 million paper documents is expensive. If they just let them sit neglected for cheaper, then they may risk confidentiality. So they have to either properly actively maintain and secure them, or destroy them for risk of some breach of confidentiality.

    Further, I don’t understand what this “disaster” would look like.

    • chitak166@lemmy.worldEnglish
      52·
      11 months ago

      “maintaining” paper documents is a new one to me.

      It’s my understanding, the less you disturb them, the longer they last.

      • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        You have to maintain a rather large facility to care for 500 million paper documents, while keeping them organized and accessible.

        You have to maintain low humidity, prevent pests like insects and rodents, and maintain vigilance against things like fire, roof leaks, and break ins.

      • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        For archival, I think things are less controversial. No one is going to modify a will executed 100 years ago and the world will say “goly gee, we missed that, we will now take from the proper heirs and give to you”.

        For one, it’s a closed matter even if they legitimately failed to execute on the old will.

        For another, if it somehow did matter, they’d probably validate the authenticity of the digital copy at least against some air gapped signature, if not going to restore the actual document from offline.

        For the voting example, I think people think too highly of the paper system. Corrupt voting infrastructure can have stuffed ballots ready to go and enough non voting registered voters to back up their ballots beyond the reasonable extent an audit would ever go. Paper votes have often been corrupted. Most we ever do is recount, and if the ballots were stuffed, this would do nothing.