Quote Originally Posted by Khendraja'aro View Post
The government? Such things are not decided by bueraucrats - they merely follow the orders passed down to them.
Actually in most countries such archives would have been destroyed long ago. It's not the shredding of these cards that is the scandal; it's the shredding of them at a time when the Government started to force people to provide proof of residence for every year that they claimed to have lived in the UK. In The Netherlands it would have been considered borderline legal to have those cards still in the archives. Unless they were considered of historical value. In which case they'd have been moved to an archive under the supervision of the National Library.

It would be highly uncommon for political appointees to be even aware of removing old files from the archives.