At the risk of being clapped in irons for heresy, I do feel the GRO have made a rod for their own back with the approach they have adopted. Guy's disbelieving comments on the method apparently being adopted for the pdf production should be noted and acted on by GRO management. It appears the only difference in the new trial system is the 'produced' image is being emailed rather than put in an envelope and posted.
The system needs to be far more automated, which in turn would allow the cost per event to be far lower. This doesn't need to be seen as a 'threat' to the GRO or employee jobs as volumes of more expensive certificates could also be increased.
The fundamental 'block' is that the data on the certificates, however old, is something regarded with a level of secrecy which requires an application and a process to produce a 'certificate'. This runs counter to the aims of open government and self-service being promoted by the current government.
I feel society would be much better served if the GRO concentrated their efforts on protecting the privacy of people still alive and combatting fraudulent use of GRO records where the possibility of fraud exists.
For example, the information on a death certificate from say 1860 has no value to fraudsters and has no privacy implications, unless someone today is concerned their ...g-grandparent died from a socially embarrassing cause. Much of the information on marriage and birth certificates is also freely available (some of it online) from parish registers.
So there is an argument that such historic data should be freely available (possibly with a small charge) rather than requiring the current bureaucratic system of control and production. Having found the death of John Smith in 1860 in the online index, why shouldn't I be able to click through to the original certificate image to see the details?
That would free up GRO staff time to produce paper certificates more promptly, and perhaps to do a far greater level of checking on the bona fides of applications for more recent information where the purpose may potentially be fraudulent.
As an example of the problems the current secrecy causes, yesterday I think I found another page of missing records. I cannot check the original images and 'solve' the problem myself, all I could do is to report it to the GRO. That will mean the GRO will be employing someone to check the originals and work out what is wrong - even though that task will not lead to any financial income.
Sorry for the long post
