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The Civil Registration Review has reached an important milestone with the publication of the first draft Regulatory Reform Order, which was published yesterday, the last day before Parliament's summer recess.
As colleagues may be aware, this Order is the first instalment of the overall review, and is concerned with the transfer of registration staff to local authority employment and the registration of births and deaths. The second part, covering marriages and other miscellaneous provisions, has already been delayed to take into account Parliament's wishes in relation to the Civil Partnership proposals, and will now be further postponed to allow consideration and consultation on an issue that concerns the absence of any proposal to change the legal requirement for marriage ceremonies to be either civil or religious.
The first RRO proposes changes in the access regime which represent a dramatic shift from the proposals in the consultation paper. The Order proposes that birth records should be fully open after 75 years and death records after 25 years. This marks a change from an access framework based on the person to one based on the event, and represents the abandonment of the proposed distinction between historic and current records. This will have a knock-on effect on the possible transfer of local registers to archive services and on the digitisation proposals. It remains to be seen how this will be reflected in the digitisation tendering process.
The changes were made in the light of representations received during the consultation process: apparently c3400 representations were received, of which 2300 were from genealogists and family historians!
Colleagues must, of course, bear in mind that this is only a draft and may be altered during the two periods of scrutiny which are the next steps in the process. It will be interesting to see what is proposed in the second RRO. This was originally expected to be presented to Parliament in November 2004; it is now probably delayed by 3- 6 months.
Jonathan Pepler