How to completely remove retention and hold policies from a site

Step by step guide to using the help function to completely remove hold policies on SharePoint sites after all other means has been explored.

Let's say you need to delete a SharePoint site, but the compliance holds and retention policies are stubbornly holding onto this. it won't let you delete the site even after putting the site on exception from policy in Purview, and you have tried all other avenues.

There was also a previous bug on Purview where a removed retention policy left the policy sticking to sites and could not be removed. After various conversations with Microsoft support staff and their escalated consultants, our team decided to just take the plunge and delete the policy outright. It did the job, but was very concerning at the time and more concerning that Microsoft didn't know anything about this particular bug. And hence why these workaround need to exist.

Enter the "help" bar. An area that, funnily enough, you never thought you needed to go.

Click on the "?" on top right hand corner in Purview. Icon right next to your face.
The click the "Ask a question" button at the bottom.

Why this is useful?

Now this area does more than just asking questions and getting useful responses.
No, there there is more to it than just that.

Using the Support Assistant, instead of asking it a question, input the following:

Diag: Invalid retention policy for SharePoint or OneDrive

This opens up a dialogue box where you can enter the website URL of the site that you have having difficulty with removing the legal holds.

Enter the URL and click on "Run Tests"

The result isn't very helpful. So we go with brute force.

Failed to exclude the SharePoint site from retention policy

We bypass the the AI based Support Assistant which isn't very helpful and go for the manual "How can we help?" prompt that was originally here. I don't know why Microsoft feels the need to AI everything when this just simply works.

I enter the following command

Removal of a site works if the policy is no longer in place and will let you know.

In other cases, it will also give you the following feedback, indicating which specific hold is preventing its deletion.

Naturally, the system will prefer that you make the site an exception on the policies page, rather than brute forcing removal. So this helps with doing removals the clean way.

Another way of looking up site retention policies is the lookup area next to the policies.

Also, it was found that removal of the actual offending policy completely. i.e. deleting policy rather than pausing or deactivating it, also does the job with removal of pesky policies. However the lead time to actually executing the command for all site in your tenant will depend heavily on how many site collections your have. Average lead time is between 24 hours to 28 days.

Additional