Room 12B, Ask for Denise

The form is called an SR-40 and you cannot complete it.

This is not pessimism. It is arithmetic. The SR-40 requires, at box 9, the reference number of your Certificate of Prior Registration, and Certificates of Prior Registration were issued by the Regional Records Office, and the Regional Records Office closed in 2011 and its functions were not transferred anywhere, because the transfer was scheduled for the following financial year, and there wasn't one.

So: box 9 cannot be completed, and the form cannot be submitted without box 9, and the thing you need cannot be obtained without the form.

There are four hundred people a year in this position. There is a support group. It has a newsletter.

And there is Denise.

You will not find Denise on the website. The website has a contact form, which generates a ticket, which is answered by a system that will tell you to complete box 9.

What you do is you go to the building on Fenner Street, and you go to the third floor, and you find room 12B, which is not marked on the board in reception because the board was printed in 2014.

You knock. You say you've been sent about box 9.

And Denise says: "Ah."

Denise has worked for the authority for thirty-one years. She was, in 1998, briefly seconded to the Regional Records Office, which is the entire reason any of this is possible.

Here is what Denise knows and the website does not.

There is a second form. It is called an SR-40(a) and it exists to be used when the SR-40 cannot be, and it was drafted in 2012 by someone who saw this coming, and it was never added to the public forms index because adding a form to the public forms index requires sign-off from a committee that meets twice a year and has not, since 2015, achieved quorum.

The SR-40(a) is entirely valid. It has a form number. It is processed normally.

It is simply not findable.

Denise has a drawer of them. She photocopies. She has photocopied, by her own estimate, somewhere north of eleven thousand.

The conversation is always the same.

"Am I allowed to have this?"

"It's a government form."

"But it's not on the—"

"It's a government form," says Denise, and slides it across, and that is the end of the discussion, and about a third of people cry, which Denise has stopped finding remarkable.

The authority is aware of Denise.

This is the part people find hardest to believe. There has been no cover-up and no plucky rebellion. Denise's line manager knows. Her line manager's line manager knows. It was raised at a directorate meeting in 2017 and the minute reads, in full: Noted.

What has not happened, in thirteen years, is the addition of the SR-40(a) to the public forms index, because that requires the committee, and the committee requires quorum, and the quorum requires a member from a directorate that was dissolved in 2016.

So instead there is a woman on the third floor with a drawer and a photocopier, and four hundred people a year who are told, by a support group newsletter, to ask for Denise.

Denise retires in March.

There is a plan for this. The plan is that her colleague Marcus, who is forty-four and has been shown the drawer, will continue.

Marcus has asked, several times, whether they should perhaps write it down somewhere official.

"You can try," says Denise.

He has tried. It goes to the committee.