Draft Registration of Marriages Regulations 2021

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Wednesday 10th March 2021 General Committees

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to be here on the latest stage of the journey that started with my private Member’s Bill, which reached the ballot in 2017, and I am grateful to the Minister for namechecking it. I was slightly disappointed not to be told about the Committee, let alone not to be put on it. It is only through the courtesy of one of the civil servants who dealt with my Bill that I found out it was happening today, which is odd.

I will make some general points and then specific queries about the regulations. The first question, which was also raised by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley, is: why has this taken so long? The four main elements of the Bill came together in 2017, but there has long been a campaign to change marriage registration for the first time since 1837 in England to enable both parents to be included on a marriage register. That is not radical; most people asked, “Doesn’t that happen already?” The trouble is that most people do not find out until the parents, usually with some nice music playing in the background, are invited by the presiding vicar to go to wherever the register is being signed. Then the mother is—in some cases, physically—restrained from adding her signature to the marriage document and is told, “Sorry, you’re not allowed.” Fortunately, when I got married, we were forewarned, but there was a double insult: my father’s signature appeared twice on my marriage certificate because he was also the presiding vicar. That doubled the insult to mothers and mothers-in-law.

The position needed changing and we all agreed that it was an anachronism. However, the Bill became an Act in February 2019 and law after Royal Assent last May. The position should have changed soon after that. Indeed, the Act includes a sunset clause, which provided that if the changes were not made in just over a year, the legislation would fall and we would have to start all over again. Why, therefore, has this taken so long? The legislation is not new and has been round the houses, helped by the former Member for Meriden, our colleague Dame Caroline Spelman, the Bishop of St Albans, who had a parallel Bill in the House of Lords, and others.

There are four main sections of the Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration etc.) Act 2019. The regulations deal with only two and put them into law.

I am delighted that the extension of civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples became a thing on 31 December 2019. Fifteen months on—I gather on 4 May—the second element of the Act will come into law. There are two outstanding elements and I wonder if the Minister can comment on that.

There is a commitment to amend the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 so that stillbirths can be investigated by a coroner. There is widespread support for that. It is a cross-departmental function, but despite our constantly badgering the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Health and Social Care, there is still no sign of that coming forward. Yet the case of babies dying in questionable circumstances in hospitals has become more urgent. That is why, with a lot of support, coroners will, I hope, be given that power to investigate. Perhaps we can have a progress report on that.

The fourth element of the legislation was a baby loss review, which the Department of Health and Social Care commissioned. I sat on the working party with the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) and many professionals. That Committee has not sat for two years and the report has never been published. We considered whether we could register children who were stillborn before the arbitrary and artificial existing 24-week threshold. Anybody who is born before 24 weeks just does not count. If the Minister can tell me about progress on that, I will be grateful.

The Minister rightly said that at last we can have mothers on the marriage certificate. Where do the regulations state that? I have been through the heavy-duty documents—and I am no expert—but which regulations actually give authority for wedding registers to contain the names of mothers and for hard copies to be signed by mothers of the happy couple?

Let me deal with the detail of the regulations. In part 3, regulation 5(3)(1) states that

“the superintendent registrar to whom notice of marriage is given must display in some conspicuous place in their office, for 28 successive days beginning with the day after the day on which the notice was recorded in the marriage register… the notice of marriage,…the particulars given in the notice, in an approved electronic form”.

I do not quite understand that. We are making the register electronic, so where does a hard-copy notice still have to be displayed? Why cannot it all be done electronically, given that we are moving into the 21st century with some of our procedures? There seems to be a paradox there.

The regulations refer to Scotland and Northern Ireland. Scotland does not have to pass such regulations because such details have sensibly been recorded there for the last couple of centuries. For some reason, England and Wales have been out of kilter with the rest of the United Kingdom. Do the regulations bring us completely in line with the existing procedures in Scotland and Northern Ireland? Is there some difference or nuance? How would it apply? There are some fairly opaque details in the regulations about how they apply to somebody from Scotland marrying somebody from England. If the couple gets married in Scotland as opposed to England, are there potential anomalies? Could we find that a Scottish mother-in-law at a wedding in York of an English son-in-law will be told, “Sorry, you’re Scottish so it doesn’t count”? I am sure that that is not the case, but after all the effort and such a long campaign, I want to make sure that no anomalies involving certain parts of the United Kingdom will crop up at a crucial moment during a wedding ceremony.

In regulation 7, new section 53B of the 1949 Act—I am sure it is at the Minister’s fingertips—states:

“Before the marriage document is signed, the clergyman by whom the marriage is to be or has been solemnized”—

Will the Minister give a definition of “clergyman”? Again, I could not find it in the regulations. Who exactly is a “clergyman”, or a clergywoman—we have many of those these days, even in the Church of England? We need a definition of exactly who is covered by that definition.

New section 53C contains the first of many references to

“according to the usages of the Jews”.

I am sure it is my inexperience, but can the Minister explain that term? Does it apply to all traditional Jewish ceremonies or only some? I assume it is regularly used for proceedings in synagogues, but can we have some clarification, because it is not clear?

New section 53D covers how the procedure now happens physically. I think that was one of the sticking points with the Church of England. According to my understanding, in a wedding service in a Church of England church, when the wedding party moves to the signing ceremony, there will still be a hard-copy register, which lots of people can now sign. That is great. A certificate will be produced and it still has to be delivered to a registrar. An electronic record is made in parallel. Loosely, I think that that is now what happens. However, there was some dispute about the document still having to be delivered to the registrar or superintendent within a short time. I think, initially, a space of eight days was contemplated.

In normal circumstances, a bride and bridegroom might have better things to do in the first eight days of their marriage. Indeed, they may well be on honeymoon elsewhere. I hope that the position has now been rectified and that a couple are not expected to delay or cut short their honeymoon to deliver a piece of paper, which is still required even though we have moved to an electronic system. I think—again, it has not been explained to me, which would have been nice—that somebody can be nominated to deliver that piece of paper. Perhaps the Minister will clarify how someone can be nominated and the timescale for completing that process. Subsection (10)(a) uses the phrase

“as soon as reasonably practicable”,

but subsection (8)(b) says “within 8 days”. Again, some clarification would be helpful.

In terms of obligations on the church, place or body performing the solemnisation of the marriage, new section 53E(3) refers to the “relevant church official” on whom there are obligations to ensure that registration is made and notified. Who is the relevant church official? In most cases, people who are involved in churches other than the vicar are volunteers. Does the provision refer to a churchwarden? Does the relevant church official have to have a certain status? How are they nominated? What happens if they mess up? Who is responsible? Again, I could not find that in the explanatory memorandum.

I realise that I have given the Minister quite a few questions to cope with, so this is probably the final question. What happens to the existing hard-copy registers? We discussed the practical problems of moving to such a radical system of electronic records and mothers being able to sign a marriage certificate with clergy and others. Many churches—certainly old churches—have marriage register books that are sometimes centuries old. They are historical documents. I presume that they can still be used and will still be part of those churches’ fabric. I gather that in some cases, while we were waiting on these regulations, some vicars in the Church of England were forward looking and a nod was given from Lambeth Palace that mothers could sign the hard copy of the certificates and the register in church, even though there was no place for them. I think that practice has been going on in some cases, even though the regulations do not come into force until 4 May.

Is there any facility for this registration to be retrospective, at least going back to when the Bill itself became law, for those mothers who have signed a register, but, I presume, will not now be part of the new electronic record? That might be particularly poignant and touching—the Minister referred to his own case—where the mother is no longer with us. Can there be some sympathetic and pragmatic retrospective approach to enabling mothers to sign the register, at least to the time when the legislation went through, after which there was a good expectation that the Government would get on with producing the regulations, which are not that hard?

What will happen going forward to those registers? Churches can still use their hard-copy register, but it now has to be backed up with a specific certificate, it has to be presented to the superintendent and it goes on the electronic register in parallel.

There are many other questions I could raise, but in the interests of not detaining the Committee for too long—I am only too aware I have given the Minister quite a plateful—I will leave it there.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Foster]

That is correct. The only things churches should not use are the current marriage certificates issued under the Marriage Act 1949. That is the thing that changes. Parish registers, which some Church of England parishes have kept literally since medieval times, can continue to be kept. There is no reason why a church cannot give something to people to mark their marriage there. However, people who attend the wedding perhaps will not see that the form that is signed is then sent by the priest back to the registrar to be entered on to the digital record.

We discussed at some length with the Church of England how we can provide a practical solution. It has thousands of priests and marriage venues that have stood for centuries, where a computer solution cannot realistically be installed in any sense, or even a mobile one, so that details can be directly entered into a digital register. This was the solution that we came to. It seems both fair and reasonable, and to be clear, the Church is perfectly happy with it.

[Tim Loughton]

On a practical point, many churches have a whole supply of marriage certificates, which may be part of a marriage register book. The Minister quite rightly says that they will effectively have no status post 4 May, because there will be the electronic record, but can they not still be used in place of the voluntary thing to give to the happy couple to frame? They will not have a legal status, but it would be a waste to have to throw them all away, would it not?

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[Tim Loughton]

Will the Minister give way?

[Kevin Foster]

I will not now, but I will cover in writing the points about the baby loss review and about coroners and stillbirth—that is perhaps a more appropriate way to update my hon. Friend.

With that, I commend the draft regulations, which will finally bring our marriage law into the 21st century.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That the Cttee has considered the draft Registration of Marriages Regulations 2021.