Readers respond to reports on the destruction of records that would have helped many Caribbean-born residents prove that they have a right to live in the UK

Your article (Home Office destroyed key data on Windrush citizens, 18 April) shows further evidence of what can go wrong institutionally in government. The destruction of paper records is hardly surprising. Bonuses and career advancement in the civil service depend on annual reports. Those instructed to reduce office space can be assumed to have made a short-term achievement by getting rid of them. There is no system for taking away a bonus or demoting an official as a result of later problems caused by short-term achievements. In any event, those who see themselves as powerful regularly underestimate transition.

In addition, the callous decisions were the result of implementing the immigration rules. They rules are not in an act of parliament. They are made under the Immigration Act 1971 but, almost uniquely in secondary legislation, are not in a statutory instrument either, which would at least have given parliamentary committees an obligation to scrutinise them under criteria in standing orders. They can be found on the web, but only with the text broken down into numerous divisions and then numerous subdivisions. So victims of adverse decisions, trying to test them, could not even search for the term “evidence” in the rules as a whole.

Peter Davis

Former counsel for domestic legislation, House of Commons

• When public records come up for destruction because they’ve reached statutory retention limits, the government departments holding them must follow guidance by the National Archives, on whether the records should be transferred to its collection for preservation.

The criteria in the National Archives’ records collection policy include documents on “the state’s interaction with the lives of its citizens”, such as “case files, datasets and other records which contain extensive information about the lives of individuals or groups, organisations and places, which contribute substantially to public knowledge and understanding of the people and communities of the UK”; and “records relating to individuals or national and international events of significant contemporary interest or controversy”.

Did the Home Office really put the decision to destroy the Windrush landing cards to this scrutiny?

Amy Nicholas

Bedingfield, Suffolk

• Learning that Windrush records had been destroyed, against the advice of those who actually knew the value of them, put a wry smile on my face. It’s what happens when people who regard record-keeping as an expensive administrative inconvenience are allowed to ride roughshod over those who do it day in, day out for a living.

I was a long-standing member of the record review team of the then Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform when it vacated its premises in Wandsworth.

There were many boxes of papers relating to some of our causes celebres that we had been told to put to one side. These related to, among other things, the bailing out of Rolls Royce in the 1970s, Pergamon Press/Robert Maxwell, the bankruptcy of Court Line, and Irving Scholar/Tottenham Hotspur FC.

In the haste to get as many files as possible out of the door as quickly as possible we were told to not waste time on them. So the records relating to these cases that are lodged at the National Archives are by no means complete.

Les Mondry-Flesch

Lymington, Hampshire

• The revelation that the Home Office destroyed – on orders – thousands of landing cards of Windrush immigrants is not the first time such incompetence has been carried out by a Conservative government. Records of war pensioners and, more importantly, the evidence they submitted to claim their war pensions, were held at a records store in Lancashire. In the 1980s, as the demands to reduce the amount of space taken up by paper records increased, a decision was taken to destroy any that hadn’t been accessed or looked at for decades. This meant that the platform on which many claims were based was lost, potentially invalidating those claims. Even worse, in the case of ex-prisoners of war of the Japanese in the far east, there was invariably no medical record of injuries, disease or mistreatment, because the Japanese refused to allow captured military doctors to keep records. In some cases, doctors had risked their own lives to keep records by using leaves from the prison hut’s roofs to make records, and these were used subsequently as the only evidence required to award a war pension. They had been preserved as priceless war records.

Thankfully, some alert staff realised the inherent danger in this action, raised it with the right people and the action was stopped, but not before many thousands of valuable and irreplaceable records of people’s military service had been destroyed.

Danny Tanzey (retired civil servant)

Thornton Cleveleys, Lancashire

• Let’s not let Theresa May off the hook by allowing her to muddy the waters (Chaos as PM fails to get grip on Windrush, 19 April). Clearly this is a matter of context. If the decision to destroy records was originally taken under a Labour administration, it was taken at a time when immigrants’ right to live in this country did not so ruthlessly get questioned, against the grain of natural justice. If the current government gave the final nod for this action, it was taken in full knowledge of the hostile environment that this current prime minister’s new immigration policy (as then home secretary) had deliberately created. By purposefully or carelessly destroying an immigrant’s possible last chance to prove their right to live and work here, they once again proved their lack of fairness and humanity.

Gene Stoddart

Manchester

• Those familiar with the history of Liverpool, with its long-established population of black British seamen from West African and West Indian colonies, will not be surprised by the Home Office treatment of more recent arrivals of the Windrush generation. “We have done what we can to prevent the alien element increasing but there is no power to deal with the British element,” a Home Office memorandum on Liverpool rued in 1934. “It is a penalty of being a mother country with a large mixed Empire. The most that we can do is to discourage coloured seamen from obtaining British passports, so that we can treat them as aliens, when they get here, and prevent them remaining.” Plus ça change.

John Belchem

Emeritus professor of history, University of Liverpool

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters