Select Committee on Regulatory Reform Minutes of Evidence


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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