Draft Registration of Marriages Regulations 2021

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Wednesday 10th March 2021 General Committees

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller. The Minister will be relieved to hear that the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham has raised a number of the issues that I wanted to raise, so he will be spared a long speech.

The Minister covers the General Register Office, which is the same role I had 11 years ago when I was Minister. I was proud then to change the birth registration so that parents who are same-sex couples could be listed as parent/mother and parent on the register. Changing marriage registration is long overdue. I hear the frustration from the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, and I commend him for his work on this issue, but I am aware that in the corridors of Whitehall, trying to get legislation to change marriage and birth registration is quite difficult, because nobody else sees it as a priority. It is really great that we are today finally getting mothers on the register.

I have a couple of quick questions about paper registers, which pick up on what the hon. Gentleman highlighted. The challenge of going digital is that, in terms of archiving, it can be very difficult. That recently came up when the Public Accounts Committee was looking at private finance initiatives, which are not that old. Some of the documents for those were on CD-ROMS. There are members of that Committee who do not know what a CD-ROM is. Will the Minister advise whether he has had any conversations with the National Archives about a plan to make sure that the digital register will be accessible for the long term? For those who do not have physical registers—some will not, because of where they choose to get married—there will not be a record. The hon. Gentleman highlighted the issue about existing paper registers. It would be helpful to have that as well.

The explanatory notes say that there has not been a formal consultation, but that the General Register Office has consulted the established churches across the UK and other religious groups. Could the Minister advise which other religious groups that applies to? Just to be clear, at the moment only certain churches—simply put, those with a hierarchy—allow their celebrants to be registrars. I assume that that has not changed; I have not been able to find that in the complex legislative documents, which amend many other Acts. Can the Minister confirm that point?

There is also an element of time to take into account. If a certificate is lost or destroyed, it looks as if there is an eight-day period for it to be replaced. If anyone has ever tried to get a copy of a registration document for birth, marriage and death, eight days is quite optimistic. As the hon. Gentleman highlighted, that could be done by volunteers. We may be dealing with something from some time before. It is not often that I have to produce my marriage certificate, but that is now nearly 25 years old—unbelievably—and my birth certificate is now, I fear, more than 50 years old. Birth certificates may be easier, but it also applies to baptism certificates and so on, and trying to track those things down. Anything to do with churches can be challenging because there are changes of personnel. Records and sometimes church buildings can go; that applies similarly to registry offices. The public sector is often very good at keeping records, but there are things that can go astray. I am slightly worried about the challenge of eight days. It could be quite difficult.

I represent a constituency that has many people who have come from across the world and who have had challenges in life. Often, finding the right document to prove something is one of the biggest barriers to their getting access to the public services they need. So it is more important than it may seem in one or two lines of the regulations. I hope the Minister can pick up those points and the others that have been raised.

[Kevin Foster]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham and the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch for such comprehensive contributions. I welcome the speech from the shadow Minister. It is pleasing to have the Opposition’s support for the regulations. Obviously, the core of what we are looking to do is not a matter of particular contention.

I start with the remarks made by the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch. We recognise that registers have two roles: one is the day-to-day need for people to prove their status or their identity, and the second is for historical records and genealogical research. I take her point about particular churches or places of worship that rely on volunteers. The quarterly returns process in the Church of England can be quite cumbersome; it is a process first started back in the 19th century.

One reason why we want to move to a digital register is to remove the need to get hold of paper documentation. That leans into wider work to allow statuses to be automatically checked by digital systems talking to each other in public services. The hon. Member will appreciate, given her previous role, that that sounds simple, but there are the challenges of making sure that appropriate data protection is in place, and that records will be accessed for legitimate purposes and with people’s consent.

The concept of a church or a religious building continuing to hold a physical register will disappear. They may well keep their historical records and parish registers, but they will no longer be getting someone to fill out a physical certificate. As we have discussed, we have had some lengthy conversations with the Church of England.

On the questions asked by my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, people will still sign a document on the day. It will be similar to now, in that the priest who celebrates the marriage will take responsibility for sending that document off to be placed on the electronic register.

Dunkerton parish church is in a small rural Dartmoor community, in the west of Devon. Marriages have been conducted there for about 700 years. It has no running water, no electricity and certainly no wi-fi. In order to provide a solution that means people can still get married in that ancient church with a wholly electronic register, we came to an appropriate position with the Church of England, which I understand it is happy with and which is as close to the current position as possible. It makes it clear that for those married in that church, the priest is responsible for sending back the form to the registrar, for it to be entered on to the digital record.

People will not see a particular difference on their wedding day, but they will not sign paper certificates on the day. That is where we need to be clear in our own minds. It is no longer about the paper being the record of the marriage. To be clear, this is about recording the event. The moment of marriage is not when it is entered on to the register; sometimes people can be confused and think that signing the register is the moment that they become married. It is not. The certificate is a record of a marriage that has taken place in the church.

[Meg Hillier]

Is it possible for people to be provided with a paper document? Some people frame their marriage certificates; they are proud of the moment. Will that be prohibited?

[Kevin Foster]

Absolutely not. There is nothing to stop that. As the hon. Member will know with baptism, which is not recorded in a secular sense by the GRO, certificates are issued by churches. I think the language on them usually says they are to be used “when the child is presented to the Bishop for confirmation.” That is true in the Anglican tradition and there is nothing to stop that. It will not be a legal document of the marriage, but electronic statuses and transactions are becoming increasingly common for most people, and this will be an easy-to-access digital status when needed—for example, to prove a marriage to a bank or someone else—rather than, necessarily, as the hon. Member says, something that someone might want to have on the wall as a record of their relationship.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Foster]

Once we get beyond 4 May, the paper registers will close. Effectively, certificate books will then need to be returned to the GRO to register the final weddings that have taken place under the previous registration system. It would not be appropriate to issue documentation that once had legal status beyond the point at which it has legal status. The current certificate books that people sign will be required to be returned and to cease being used.

[Meg Hillier]

The Minister talked just now about proving status to a bank or someone. There is a challenge here. Who has access to the register? What are the cyber-security issues around that and who gives permission for that? I am already married, but if I were to get married after 4 May, would that mean that the Minister could look up my marriage? Who in a bank would have the power to do that? Could it be done only with my permission? What are the data protection controls around this hugely important database, which could be used for all sorts of nefarious reasons, as well as benevolent ones?

[Kevin Foster]

The hon. Member will know that one reason we are moving to a digital system, away from paper, is that paper is far easier to forge or produce copies of, particularly in the modern era, than in the 19th century, although it has to be said that the register is actually a public document. It is not like the census document, which is kept for 100 years. The registers are actually public and can be consulted, as she will be aware of, given her previous time being responsible for the GRO. I think that we can put that particular concern slightly to one side.

We are also looking at digitising some historical records, to make them far easier to search for those looking to do family history and research. As the hon. Member will know from her time with the GRO, family history, especially discovering dates of marriage, can be quite interesting, particularly when going back to grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ generations. When going through a family tree, someone may discover that the great-grandparents who swore blind they got married in 1919 actually got married in 1920, and then realise that grandad was on his way a couple of months later. There is a general part that we are looking to digitise

[Meg Hillier]

Will the Minister give way?

[Kevin Foster]

I will give way once more, and then I will make some more progress.

[Meg Hillier]

Forgive me, but this is an important point. There is a difference with a physical register that someone can look at. The register has people’s addresses and the names of their parents, which are security questions when signing into a bank account. Who gives permission for the register to be checked? Is it completely open to the public, or is there some brake on that to ensure that it is not used inappropriately to mine IDs and to be used for nefarious reasons? That is absolutely fundamental.

When we were looking at introducing identity cards, which of course were not introduced, there were huge debates and discussion of detailed legislation about the security of the data and who would give permission to access it. Although this data is already out there, that is not in the same way as being in a parish register, rather than actually online.

Recently, my local authority suffered a major cyber-security attack, and was very much helped by Whitehall to sort it out, but it will take a year to resolve some of the issues, and important data was stolen and put on the dark web. The issues are therefore very serious and pertinent. I hope that the Minister will address that before we pass the draft regulations.

[Kevin Foster]

First, one of the most common ways of creating identities at the moment is to forge outdated paper certificates, hence why we are keen to move away from paper certificates, which are easily forged and used for nefarious purposes. Clearly, therefore, we want to move to a digital register.

As the Committee may have picked up, another private Member’s Bill is before the House on Friday, relating to birth and death registration where, similarly, we want to move away from the paper certificate process towards a more secure online register as the final arbiter. That is of course out of the scope of the Committee, but it shows the general thrust of the Government’s plans to modernise a pretty outdated system of registration, emphasised not only by the fact that mothers’ details are on marriage certificates but by the process still being heavily rooted in the past.

The position on access to the register will be the same as it is today. I accept that it is slightly different when someone is checking on a computer, rather than walking down to Somerset House, although a lot of that can be done online already, via records already digitised.

To come to some of the other points, my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham stated that he cannot see a mention of mothers’ names on marriage certificates. As he will be aware from our long discussions of his private Member’s Bill that is now an Act, a lot of the purpose was to remove much of the specification in primary legislation that we would not put there today. The actual content will be prescribed in regulations made by the Registrar General, with the approval of the Secretary of State. However, the draft regulations to amend primary legislation will remove the more outdated requirements and then allow the new certificate to include mothers’ names and occupations. To be clear, that is where that will be specified finally, but allowing this to go forward will be the core part.

In a couple of other questions, my hon. Friend asked why a Bill that became an Act in late 2019 is being acted upon in 2021. Originally, we were hoping to launch the new system last year. I hope that the Committee will understand why the middle of a global pandemic, when registrars were urgently having to adapt their birth and death registration systems to cope, was widely viewed as not the appropriate time to introduce a brand new system of marriage registration. We would very much have liked to move forward with it last year, but we wholly accepted the points made by the registration system, that the middle of a pandemic was not an appropriate moment. However, with a lot of weddings delayed to this summer due to the impact of the social distancing regulations last year, now is the time to take the new system forward.