The National Archives (TNA; Welsh: Yr Archifau Cenedlaethol) is a non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom.

The Public Record Office still exists as a legal entity, as the enabling legislation has not been modified,[6][7] and documents held by the institution thus continue to be cited by many scholars as part of the PRO.

The department is the responsibility of the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Sport, Media, Civil Society and Youth; a minister in His Majesty's Government.

Until its closure in March 2008, the Family Records Centre in Islington was run jointly by The National Archives and the General Register Office.

The National Archives was created in 2003 by combining the Public Record Office and the Historical Manuscripts Commission and is a non-ministerial department reporting to the Minister of State for digital policy.

[16] Under the 2003 Historical Manuscripts Commission Warrant it has responsibility for investigating and reporting on non-governmental records and archives of all kinds throughout the United Kingdom.

[23] Anybody aged 16 or over can access the original documents at the Kew site, after producing two acceptable proofs of identity and being issued a free reader's ticket.

[25] Once a same-day document order has been placed, The National Archives aims to get it to the reader within 45 minutes (assuming it is kept at Kew rather than at their second repository, "Deep Store" – a former salt mine in Cheshire: it can take 2–3 days for files to be retrieved from the latter).

[30] Frequently accessed documents such as the Abdication Papers had originally been captured on microfilm, as were the aggregated service records for two million First World War soldiers.

In the event of a fire The National Archives would be clearly unable to use sprinklers for fear of ruining its holdings, and so when the building is evacuated, argon gas is released into the air-tight repositories.

The National Archives's education web page is a free online resource for teaching and learning history, aimed at teachers and students.

[54] Where the catalogues are themselves available online the indexes provide direct electronic links; but many still exist in hard copy only (often as unpublished "grey literature"), and it remains necessary for the researcher to visit either TNA or the specific repository in order to consult them.

ARCHON Directory is a database of contact details for archive repositories in the UK and institutions elsewhere in the world which have substantial collections of manuscripts relating to British history.

[68] In January 2011 The National Archives, in conjunction with historian Nick Barratt and smartphone applications development studio RevelMob,[69] developed its first Old Money iPhone app,[70] which uses historic price data from documents held at The National Archives to see what a sum of money from the past (from 1270) would be worth today and the spending power it would have commanded at the time.

[71] In September 2011, TNA's museum began using QRpedia codes, which can be scanned by smartphone users in order to retrieve information about exhibits from Wikipedia.

Posts cover a wide range of topics, from specific events and time periods to features on holdings in TNA, as well as information on the archive's operations.

In response to concerns stated by politicians and historians about management of the collection, the archives stressed that the number of missing files is quite small in proportion to the entire holdings of the repository – about 0.01% – and that, as of 2017, its loss rate was only around 100 documents, annually.

[77][78] In June 2005, journalist Ben Fenton of The Daily Telegraph received an email from a colleague asking him to investigate documents held at TNA that alleged that a British intelligence agent had, on the orders of Winston Churchill, murdered Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi SS, in 1945.

[79] On viewing photographs of the documents, Fenton's suspicions were immediately aroused by the fact that such a controversial policy was casually committed to paper, even to the extent of naming the assassin, and by the use of colourful language.

This confirmed his suspicions and, along with his experience of analysing historic documents, it enabled him to persuade The Daily Telegraph to pay for forensic analysis.

Further investigations by TNA staff revealed that the counterfeit documents contained errors, breaches of protocol and etiquette which their supposed authors would not have committed.

[79] After his account of the deception appeared in the newspaper, Fenton was contacted by a German academic, Ernst Haiger, who informed him of his own suspicions over other TNA documents cited in an earlier Allen book.

According to the experts at TNA, documents now shown to be forgeries supported controversial arguments central to each of Allen's books: in Hidden Agenda, five documents now known to be forged helped justify his claim that the Duke of Windsor betrayed military secrets to Hitler; in The Hitler/Hess Deception, thirteen forged papers supported Allen's contention that, in 1941, British intelligence used members of the Royal family to fool the Nazis into thinking Britain was on the verge of a pro-German putsch; in Himmler's Secret War, twenty-two counterfeit papers also underpinned the book's core claims that British intelligence played mind games with Himmler to encourage him to betray Hitler from 1943 onwards, and that ultimately they murdered the SS chief.

In a December 2007 response to questions from Norman Baker MP, the Solicitor-General said that the police investigation, guided by the opinion of a senior barrister, had produced "sufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction" on charges of forgery, using a forged document and criminal damage but it had been decided that it was not in the public interest to proceed.

In reaching that decision, "matters relating to Mr Allen's health and the surrounding circumstances were significant in deciding that a prosecution was not in the public interest".

[82] Additional MI5 records relating to the blacklisting of government workers during Thatcher's time in office have also prompted questions after their release.

[83] In addition to government workers, the blacklists also targeted other groups, such as unions and minorities, that may not fall in line with Conservative policies.

[83] Debates on the roles of MI5, Whitehall, and Thatcher's administration, have come up in light of these records at TNA and prompted questions of transparency as well as whether or not these blacklists had an effect on the careers of any individuals included.