The changes that were proposed in Registration Review of 2002 would have been enacted under the provisions of the Regulatory Reform Act 2001. If this worked, it would have been a neat way of making the appropriate changes without an Act of Parliament.
There were some good proposals in the Review, but also some pretty bad ones, so it would have been a mixed blessing at best. It failed at the Parliamentary scrutiny stage, for a number of reasons. So we were back to square one, not for the first time - earlier attempts to change the law had always run out of parliamentary time.
The real sticking point is the wording in the 1836 Act that stipulates that information may only be given in the form of a certified copy. Fortunately for Scotland, the 1854 Act only mentions 'extracts'. That is one of the reasons Scotland has been able to set up a service like ScotlandsPeople, while England and Wales are stuck with the unwieldy business of having to produce certified copies, at about twice the cost of simple photocopies.
Certification is expensive because of the special paper used, the fact that every certificate blank has to be numbered and accounted for, the secure conditions under which stocks of them need to be kept, and the extra staff time involved in administering the system.
Realistically, more complete and detailed indexing as per Dove etc will be a help, if and when we see it, combined with the various UKBMD projects. But this will be some time coming, as the GRO have yet to make an announcment about how the remainder of the project will be progressed, if at all.
Mean_genie
