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Not quite sure why you think it is a "grey" area. 

To clarify:

For my research purposes, what I'd really like to be able to say (with a good degree of accuracy) is that during YYYY there were, e.g., xxx births registered in Swansea. The same for deaths and marriages. It looks like using Freebmd or the GRO index as a "count" option will not give me an accurate figure due to the reasons you and Anthony have mentioned. That's life...

Thinking that births and deaths were "simple", one register entry events, (I now know they are not always so) I was planning on using Freebmd count results for Bs and Ds. I've actually sent a FOI request for the number of marriages registered in Swansea for the war years though where that will get me, I don't know. I'm not after names etc just a number.

Maybe naively I thought that if the first marriage register entry for a particular year was numbered e.g. 345 and the last one was 999, the Registrar's staff could easily work out the annual figure - and the annual figure might, in any event, already be included in an old annual report on a dusty shelf... and easily looked up. I'd be surprised if the local office didn't keep a summary of the number of events registered over the years. But you never know...(well, I don't, anyway...)

I may well have to just omit any detailed reference to the B-M-D figures in what I write. A shame, but it's only a couple of paragraphs (and a table) among 80,000 words.

Thanks for the advice!

Bernard