Annual report and accounts 2024–25

Read the Annual Report

We are a non-ministerial government department and the official archive and publisher for the UK Government and for England and Wales. We are guardians of over 1,000 years of history and our collection contains over 11 million historical government and public records.

We are expert advisers in information and records management, a cultural, academic and heritage institution, and fulfil a leadership role for the archives sector in England.

This year’s report covers a successful year during which Saul Nassé took over as Chief Executive and Keeper of Public Records. Our goals were organised under three themes: building the value of our collection, sustaining value through custodianship and creating value through connection.

Significant achievements have included the signing of the partnership agreement that provides the basis for the relocation of the Parliamentary Archives collection to Kew, and the transfer of over 2 million records as part of our transfer of historical military service personnel records from the Ministry of Defence. We also received our largest ever single digital transfer of records from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. We saw record numbers of visitors to our exhibitions, including to our Spirit of Invention exhibition when it travelled to the Discovery Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne, and were pleased that the National Archives Trust was able to fund a new programme to facilitate schools’ visits.

Collection

As the archive of the state, we continue to accession digital and physical records, and this year made significant transfers across several projects.

• In February 2025, we completed the partnership agreement that provides the basis for the relocation of the Parliamentary Archives – its collections and some associated services and staff – from the Palace of Westminster to The National Archives. As a result, we were able to recommence physical transfers and are now expecting to take custodianship of the entire collection of circa 15 linear km of historic documents by September 2025. In the meantime, we began to work on the digital elements of the transfer, including setting up necessary infrastructure, establishing a secure home for the collection’s descriptive data and migrating the Web Archive to our operational systems.
• We received our largest ever single digital transfer of over half a million records (1,100GB) from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. In February 2025, the first of these records were made available to the public. Given their national significance, we have published a research guide that explains how the public can access this collection.
• We have made good progress with our project to transfer almost 10 million historical military service personnel records from the Ministry of Defence to The National Archives. This is the largest physical transfer in The National Archives’ history – we expect full receipt of these records to add 50 linear km to our collection and to double our number of orderable records. We took over 2 million records into our care this year, bringing the total transferred to over 7 million and leaving us on track to complete the transfer project by March 2027.
• This year we worked with government to raise standards in information management with the aim of improving the decision-making processes according to which transfers are made. We continued to develop a modular self-assessment tool for government departments and piloted a new maturity assessment framework focussed on the appraisal, selection and sensitivity review of digital records. We also made several improvements to the way digital records are transferred to us, including adding features to our Transfer Digital Records (TDR) service that enable users to review metadata on transfer as well as separately uploading it.

Custodianship

As custodians of the records entrusted to us, we have made significant investments in our buildings and digital infrastructure to ensure their safekeeping.

• We have made several upgrades to our site to help us protect and conserve our collections. We began a project to replace all the windows in the older section of our building which will restore efficient operational and environmental performance in the repositories. We have also upgraded the environmental monitoring system in our repositories enabled by a grant from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. This comprises a state-of-the-art Internet of Things LoRaWAN environmental monitoring system consisting of 400 indoor sensors and an external weather station, allowing us to not only track fluctuations in temperature and relative humidity but also to analyse the factors contributing to these changes.
• We have also made improvements to our digital infrastructure and made cyber security a corporate priority. We introduced a new, cloud based, digital preservation system as part of which we are maintaining a separate custodial copy of digital records. We have maintained the registry of file format signatures (PRONOM) that is relied on by digital preservation teams around the world.

Connection

Providing access to our collection is central to our task as we actively seek to optimise its public value.

• Our exhibition, Great Escapes: Remarkable Second World War Captives, which opened last year ran until 21 July 2024. This exhibition explored the stories of prisoners of war and civilian internees during the Second World War and attracted 7,755 visitors this financial year. Despite the subsequent closure of our gallery for renovations, we attracted the most visitors ever to our exhibitions as Spirit of Invention, our family exhibition, opened at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne. The exhibition ran from March to June 2024 in partnership with Tyne & Wear Archives as part of a new touring exhibitions programme and attracted 21,010 visitors in this financial year. In total, our exhibitions attracted 28,765 visitors across 2024-25.
• We engaged with more than 40,000 students in total through workshops (24,898, including 17,457 online and 7,441 on site) and digital resources developed using the Clore Learning Space (over 15,700). 86% of our workshops were delivered to state schools and we have diversified access geographically with 41% of education workshops booked by schools outside London and the South-East (56% for online workshops). With the support of The National Archives Trust, we have launched a travel bursary scheme for schools which offers a £500 grant for schools that would otherwise find visiting to be financially prohibitive. 15 bursaries were awarded in 2024-25.
• Our collections continue to be used in national and international events for engagement purposes. This year we accessioned the coronation roll of His Majesty King Charles III and Queen Camilla (C 57/18), and on 1 May 2024 our staff attended the presentation of the coronation roll to Their Majesties at Buckingham Palace. They were able to provide information on the form, function and materials of the existing coronation rolls held at The National Archives, dating back to 1308, after helping to shape the contents of the new roll. In July 2024, we displayed the 1949 Treaty of London (FO 93/1/378) which set the Statutes of the Council of Europe, at the European Political Community Summit at Blenheim Palace. The Summit was attended by more than 50 leaders, many of whom saw the Treaty and remarked on the importance of history and archives. The Treaty was later displayed in Parliament at the Lord Speaker’s Lecture.

Archive Sector and Research

We play an active role in sustaining and optimising the value and impact of archives through research, scholarship and supporting other archival institutions.

• Following a commission by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), we have been working to produce a new Strategic Vision for the Archive Sector. We partnered with BOP Consulting to carry out an extensive consultation of more than 400 archive professionals, stakeholders and users to inform the new vision. It will be finalised with ministers in 2025-26 and will guide our leadership of the sector to ensure that archives across the country thrive.
• We launched an expanded Archives Revealed programme funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Wolfson Foundation and Pilgrim Trust. £708,351 was awarded in its first funding rounds across 21 projects (including £538,970 in cataloguing grants), with nearly £2 million to be awarded in 2025-26. This is an enormous increase in our ability to support the archive sector across the UK. Outside of Archives Revealed, 36 grants worth £208,603 were awarded across our Risk, Resilience, Engagement, Research and Innovation and Skills programmes, providing support to the archive sector across its strategic needs. We received more than 200 applications for funding across all our programmes.
• This year we launched our Research Vision for 2024-2027. This identifies areas of research interest spanning our responsibilities: trusted and secure custodianship, a responsible and sustainable future, global and inclusive access and an archive within and for our society. It also contains a Roadmap to connect that organisational vision to the work of our Research, Grants and Academic Engagement department, outlining key actions to grow the value, profile and strategic impact of our research and grants portfolios.
• We had our most successful year ever in terms of income from grants, receiving £2.04 million in the 2024-25 financial year, an increase of 95% on 2023-24 and of 215% on 2022-23. Major grants won this year include: £5.6 million from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Wolfson Foundation and Pilgrim Trust for Archives Revealed; £1 million from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for Spaces, Places and Belonging, a new hub for community research in the cultural heritage sector; £1 million from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation for PASSAGE, a research and global mobility programme on transatlantic slavery; and £1.32 million from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for two projects in their Research Infrastructure for Conservation and Heritage Science (RICHeS) programme. The PASSAGE and RICHeS projects grew from pilot work funded by our Strategic Research Fund, which funded a further 11 projects in this financial year. We submitted 53 grant funding applications with a total value of £5.03 million.

Appendices

Core financial tables 2024-25

Summary of public records transmitted to The National Archives 2024-25

This report is produced annually. It provides a summary of the public records transmitted to The National Archives from various sources. It gives a brief description for each piece, including the dates covered.

Exercise of delegated powers conferred on the Secretary of State by the Public Records Act 1958

This report is produced annually. It gives details on how The National Archives has exercised particular powers delegated to our Chief Executive and Keeper by the Secretary of State. These documents provide information on:

• Approval given for the transfer of public records between The National Archives and places of deposit, in either direction.
• The appointment of approved places of deposit for public records with specific local relevance or particular specialist and administrative requirements, which are held outside The National Archives.
• Approval given for the presentation of public records that have not been selected for permanent preservation at The National Archives to other appropriate bodies.

Reports and accounts in the UK Government Web Archive

Reports from previous years can be viewed in the UK Government Web Archive.