Registers of Births and Deaths Bill

Debate between Peter Bone and Tom Randall

2nd reading
Friday 26th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tom Randall]

Grudgingly so.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

I was not going to speak and am sort of in favour of possibly supporting this Bill, but my hon. Friend’s speech is making me doubt it. Surely having a paper record is a safeguard if someone hacks into the digital one. He is making a good point, and I think he is persuading me to vote against the Bill.

[Tom Randall]

I hope that as I develop my argument, I will begin to show my hon. Friend the error of his ways and how I have convinced myself that my Tory instincts are, on this occasion, perhaps not entirely right.

As I have read further into this matter, I have come to realise that what we have had for so long is not some handsome bound volumes on a shelf to be admired in libraries for years to come, but essentially computer printouts, as I understand it. We have not been recording history beautifully; we have just been duplicating a process—printing out what is really part of a spreadsheet almost and putting it in a loose-leaf binder that is then stored in some secure box in some office somewhere. I am intrigued to know what happens to that secure room in a sub-district departmental office somewhere, perhaps forgotten or secured to some rather dreary out-of-town facility. The glamour and the romance I thought we perhaps had with the way we recorded this important information is a completely inaccurate picture. For that reason, I now realise the error of my ways and I hope the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) will also come to realise that progress, digitisation and computerisation are things to which we will all, reluctantly, have to subscribe.

This issue speaks to one of the core functions of government: record-keeping of births and deaths, and knowing who is in the country. The circumstances of where people have been born and where they have died is one of the very core functions of government. Therefore, getting the Bill on the statute book in the right way may not be glamorous, but it is important to get it right and done as accurately as possible.

The other point that doubters perhaps need to hear is that we have a duplication system. It is not the case that we have bound volumes that are the record. The paper copies we have at the moment are already redundant. It appears that we have an electronic system, which is really the primary system, and the paper copies are an adjunct. They are already redundant. One might ask why we have them at this point anyway, as they have already been proven to be beyond their use. I have not had the experience of registering a birth and I am very fortunate that, so far, I have never had to register a death, but the important point has been made, and I can very well imagine and sympathise, that those experiences can be very emotional and traumatic. They happen at a time when we have 1,001 things that we need to do, and making a trip to do something very bureaucratic and burdensome is something an ordinary person could really do without. We have to remember that government is supposed to work for people, certainly at very emotionally difficult periods of their life.