Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
MR RICHARD
RATCLIFFE, MS
ELSE CHURCHILL
AND MR
GEOFF RIGGS
26 OCTOBER 2004
Q40 Chairman: Is Mr Ratcliffe in charge?
Mr Ratcliffe: I believe so, Sir.
Q41 Chairman: Can I welcome you here.
You have heard the first session of evidence, so I will not repeat
everything I said then, but if you want to introduce your team
and make any brief opening comments and say what your organisation
is and what your interests are, then we will move on to questions.
Mr Ratcliffe: Thank you very much,
Sir. My name is Richard Ratcliffe, I am former chairman of the
Federation of Family History Societies and now I am Legislation
Liaison Officer and I have been involved in family history for
over 20 years. On my left is Ms Else Churchill, who is also representing
the Federation today, and she is Genealogy Officer for the Society
of Genealogists. On my right Mr Geoff Riggs, who is a member of
the Federation's executive and who has a particular interest in
Welsh matters on this particular subject. We do not wish to make
an opening statement because we have already sent in submissions
to you. We are here to answer questions.
Q42 Chairman: Your submission was very
helpful to us.
Mr Riggs: If I may add a rider
to that. One of the areas I hope you will be coming to later is
the area of data capture. I am a former Vice Chairman of the Federation
and currently Director of Computer and Internet Facilities.
Q43 Chairman: Thank you very much. Can
you please give an indication of your view on the process of reforming
civil registration as developed so far and what you feel about
the consultation exercise?
Mr Ratcliffe: First of all, we
welcome the fact that a lot of previous Acts are now being brought
together under this Regulatory Reform Order. It is a case of bringing
things which have been happening since 1837 together and making
things up to date. We welcome that. We are concerned though that
there are a number of proposals in the document which need considerable
and detailed consideration. First of all, can I mention that we
feel that the plan to digitise records, at the moment, is extremely
vague. In fact, a lot of the documents in sections 20 and 21 are
very vague, both for historic and modern records. The documents
give no information at all about the digitisation of historic
records, that is, those records that it proposes which are more
than 75 years old. We are very concerned about the future of those
records and what is likely to happen to them. The only commitment
is that there will be funding to digitise records back to 1993,
that is mandatory in the document, but before 1993 it is extremely
vague and there are no figures whatsoever about the funding and
what will be available for this exercise to be carried out.
Q44 Chairman: Noting the points that
you have made, do you feel that the consultation has been adequate?
Do you believe, having heard what I said about our system of Regulatory
Reform Orders, as opposed to the normal legislation, it is right
that it should be dealt with in this way?
Ms Churchill: Given that genealogists
have been trying to be consulted about access to the civil-registration
records since 1913, we felt this was a remarkable improvement.
We were informed throughout the process and we have an active
genealogical community who managed to précis the document,
so it was digestible, and to look at the points that we felt were
important to our genealogical community. We sent 2,300 responses
to your consultation; I am not the sure what the average number
to your consultation is generally for a Regulatory Reform Order
but I am sure that it is a lot larger than you have had before.
We think we have made it widely available to our community and
we have a very efficient communication system. We were pleased
that we were consulted and we have tried to make the information
as obvious to the public, on how it would affect them, as we could.
Q45 Brian White: Obviously, you have
got a direct interest in this. How do you think this is going
to help or hinder people trying to trace their family history?
Ms Churchill: We hope it will
help by finally making material available from a distance, quicker
and easier. We welcome on-line access because that is clearly
the way our community wants to go. All the institutions involved
in genealogical services are looking at distance accessibility.
We think it will hinder the process because you are taking some
information away from us that is clearly of vital use for those
involved in family history research, and we feel that some of
the burdens have been placed more on the genealogical community.
We have made our opinion known, but we have not necessarily had
all of our points taken into consideration and we feel there is
some compromise there. Generally, anything that makes these records
more widely available and cheaper has got to be good for us.
Mr Ratcliffe: The Federation is
an educational charity and one of our prime aims is to promote
accuracy of research and make sure that people, when they are
tracing their family tree, do get accurate information. In fact,
restricting some of the information, which is proposed in the
Order, could hinder people getting fully accurate information
about their family trees, particularly if they are starting off.
Just to give you an example of how popular it is: the present
BBC series which started a fortnight ago, the first programme,
attracted 5.7 million viewers. You have a large amount of the
public who are interested in this, and we are a small cog trying
to promote accurate research and trying to make sure that people
do get an accurate family tree, not a fictitious one, at the end
of their endeavours.
Q46 Brian White: Would the BBC programme
have been able to do what it is doing if these changes had been
in place?
Mr Ratcliffe: No. I think it would
have restricted them because they would not have been able to
have, for example, the cause of death on a death certificate.
They would not have had the information on a birth certificate
of the place of birth, because often the place of birth is different
from the address where the family was living. This could stifle
quite a lot of the research which is vital at the beginning when
people are setting out on this exciting adventure to trace their
family history.
Q47 Brian White: One of the most specialist
areas is people who have been adopted and are trying to trace
their natural families. Obviously, that is a concern. Will this
impact on that area?
Ms Churchill: Significantly, I
would have thought. In many ways, modern research is reliant on
having the information on where the parents may have been living
and their occupations. Occupational information is not being taken
away, but addresses are, but you take the whole body of the information
that you have got and try to work out, for modern research, who
the person is that you are dealing with. While we know there are
other consultation processes and forms to look at the accessibility
to adoption records, I am not sure that they have been quite easily
joined up together in these two processes.
Q48 Dr Naysmith: This raises an interesting
area of where there is a lot of room for argument. What you are
saying is that the right to freedom of information is more important
than the right to privacy?
Ms Churchill: We accept that,
of course, there has to be a balance. At the moment, we think
that balance is still slightly tipped too heavily. We are not
quite sure how a 74-year-old address can cause too much of a problem
with data protection issues of privacy.
Q49 Dr Naysmith: What about the situation
where someone has expressly said that something held in the register
should be kept private and they do not want it to be freely available?
Ms Churchill: I think there are
times when people interact with the state and use the information,
for example, birth certificates, as forms of identification. You
mentioned earlier on that there might be different issues, such
as identity fraud, but, I think, there has to be some kind of
openness about who you are and some kind of identity for yourself
and for your descendants as well.
Q50 Dr Naysmith: Your assumption is that
it is always a good thing that other people are able to delve
into your family background. That cannot be right, can it?
Ms Churchill: In my 22 years'
of experience, on the whole, I see most people getting benefits
out of finding out who they are, and about their relationships
within the community and with family. For the majority of people,
I have seen it to be beneficial.
Q51 Dr Naysmith: There are people who
are interested in this sort of thing and I am sure the great majority
never get involved in it. Maybe some of them are quite happy that
the information related to them is not publicly available.
Mr Riggs: Genealogy is the second
most popular hobby in the country and it is the second most popular
and accessed subject on the internet.
Q52 Dr Naysmith: What is the most popular?
Mr Riggs: Pornography is the most
popular.
Q53 Dr Naysmith: I thought fishing was.
Mr Riggs: Genealogy has actually
overtaken finance as the second most popular subject.
Q54 Mr Naysmith: You are quite happy
with the situation?
Ms Churchill: Certainly, and we
see that there has to be a balance involved. No one is advocating
that all family historians have rights over everybody but at the
moment we think it has tipped slightly against our favour.
Q55 Mr Naysmith: The ONS, the Office
for National Statistics, has said that it believes that the proposals,
taken as a whole, will result in an overall improvement in the
accessibility of registration records of the public. That is not
quite what you are saying. What do you think about what they are
saying?
Ms Churchill: We have reservations
about issues of accessibility, particularly with regard to having
access to local records. I will reiterate what we said earlier
on. We want to see a consistency of service in local access to
records, because we have problems with accuracy. We feel that
access through the database should be through prime historical
source material, and that prime historical source material is
the local record and not the second duplicated copy held by the
Registrar General. In any process where you have a transcription
of the record, Chinese whispers will occur and there will be errors.
We would look for guarantees of accuracy and quality as high as
you can get. I realise it is never going to be 100%, but an on-line
database for modern and historical records will make records easier
to access and much cheaper than it is at the moment. We have always
advocated that genealogists do not need a legal certified copy,
we just need the data. We see no reason why we have had to pay
for them, particularly the green, black and pink official documents.
Anything that makes that information more accessible and cheaper
has got to benefit the genealogical community as a whole.
Q56 Dr Naysmith: You have answered my
next question. Having dealt with the disadvantages, I was going
to ask you what the main advantages are for you in the current
proposals, and you are saying cheapness and availability of information
if it is available in electronic form.
Ms Churchill: Cheapness and availability
but our overriding concern is accuracy.
Mr Ratcliffe: Can I say that we
are particularly concerned about accessibility as explained in
the document. It is far too vague at the moment as to what kind
of public access there will be if this Order goes through, and
the Federation is particularly anxious that the local registrars'
records are considered the prime source rather than the copy records
at ONS, because there is evidence that records have got lost in
the post in the past by being sent on from the registrars to Somerset
House originally and ONS now. Also what kind of access will there
be to the original historical records if the Order goes through.
Will it be at a registrar's office, will it be in a county record
office or elsewhere, because these places do not have the storage
facilities or the staffing to manage these records. Of course,
the preservation and conservation of these records is equally
very important as well.
Q57 Mr Lazarowicz: What would you say
to the suggestion that the proposals to modernise the service
in this way should only be brought forward after the detailed
arrangements for the construction of the data base and the digitisation
of records have been fully developed and agreed? Is this taking
things in the wrong order?
Mr Riggs: I think it is, but the
Regulatory Reform Order says that no decision has yet been taken
as to whether it should be the central records or local records,
it will be based on cost and practicability. Despite that, as
we heard from Julie Hole in the earlier evidence, a dialogue has
already started between the ONS and the potential suppliers. As
part of that dialogue it has already been admitted that it is
cheaper and more practical to do the central records, despite
what the Regulatory Reform Order says. That dialogue is a public
record on the internet, on the GRO website but far more disquieting
aspects there it seems the historic records will take second place
to the modern ones in terms of funding. In other words, they will
(a) set up the current structure to interface with other government
departments (b) they will then finance the modern records, 1935
onwards, and "what is left" may be used, if it is sufficient,
to do the earlier records.
Q58 Mr Lazarowicz: Is it fair to say
you would want to see some more clarity at least on the Government's
direction there?
Mr Riggs: Yes, and I think in
fact the detailed discussion and dialogue with suppliers cuts
across some of the vagueness and goes a long way as far as we
are concerned. It implies they will accept readily overseas keying
of the data to keep the costs down. We know from experience in
our community that overseas keying leads to errors, not necessarily
because English is not their first language but because of lack
of knowledge of local place names and surnames, and we can quote
copious evidence of this.
Q59 Mr Lazarowicz: So the information
could be keyed in 10,000 miles away from the UK?
Mr Riggs: It was done for the
1901 census by QinetiQ for the Government's own website, and that
was in Sri Lanka and India, and we have errors there for instance,
where a carpet dealer in Yorkshire has become a camel trader.
That is one facetious example. There are lots of more serious
ones where you have a family where the head of family's surname
is entered in full, subsequent members have been entered as "ditto",
they have been keyed in as Ditto, indexed as Ditto, and you would
never find them, until that was pointed out by our own members
and it has now been corrected. I am sure Mr Havard will sympathise
with the problems in Wales especially, and we wonder what will
happen to some of the Welsh place names if they are done overseas
without local knowledge.
Mr Lazarowicz: Some of us have surnames
which might be easier to be keyed in overseas!
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