Care records
Regardless of your age and when you were in care, you have the right to ask to see your Care Records.
In most cases you’ll be allowed to see your childhood case files from when you were in care. There are many reasons why people want to see their records; such as curiosity, wanting to trace family members, or looking for medical information about hereditary illnesses. You don’t have to give a reason why you want to see them, although you may be asked for one.
When you ask to see your care records, we will:
- deal with your request under the Data Protection Act 1998 and give you the information within 30 calendar days. Sometimes if there are a lot of files, we may need up to 3 months to get it ready. If this is the case we’ll let you know how long it will take and why it’s going to take longer than 30 days.
- respond promptly and arrange for a support worker to help you read through your files if you need one. For example, if you can not read very well or if you are worried about how you will feel when you read sensitive information about your childhood.
- tell you if we know that any files are missing or no longer in existence. Since the Children’s Act 1989 we have had to keep records for longer (75 years for foster care cases and 100 years for adoption cases) but the record keeping before this was not as consistent, so if you request files from before 1989, we may not always have them.
- ‘redact’ (meaning cover up) any personal information in your files, that is about somebody other than you. We have to do this by law to protect the other person’s privacy.