Statistics and Registration Service Bill

All right hon. and hon. Members have unfinished business. Part 2 is of special interest to me in that context, as I shall explain. When I was elected to Parliament in 1997, I was appointed honorary patron of the Society of Registration Officers in England and Wales, otherwise known as SORO. I declare that interest before proceeding. I succeeded Joyce Quin, then Member of Parliament for Gateshead, East and Washington, West and now Baroness Quin, to that post when she was appointed Minister of State at the Home Department. Since my appointment as SORO’s honorary patron, I have been campaigning for the employment rights of registration officers who are statutory officers. Approximately 1,700 registrars and superintendent registrars are affected by part 2 of the Bill. The remainder of the approximately 7,000 employees of the civil registration service are already local authority employees. Statutory officers have no legal employer and therefore do not have employment rights as employees, although they might have some rights as workers under some employment legislation; therefore, in that respect their current position is complex. Today, registration officers are appointed by local authorities, accommodated by local authorities and paid by local authorities, and their pensions are arranged and paid by them as well. Yet when they are unfairly or constructively dismissed, they have no right to apply for a hearing before an employment tribunal. In the past 10 years, at least 18 registrars or superintendent registrars have been dismissed from the civil registration service. The Registrar General alone can dismiss registrars or superintendent registrars, despite their close involvement with local authorities. The Registrar General can hear an appeal, but only if there is new material to consider. In the previous Session of Parliament I introduced a ten-minute Bill: the Registration Service Bill. It would have changed the status of registration officers who are statutory officers to that of employees of local authorities. SORO, Unison and I have been campaigning for that for more than seven years. My Bill also had the support of the Employers Organisation for Local Government and Local Authorities Coordinators of Regulatory Services—LACORS. There is, however, a difficulty: because registration officers have no legal employer, the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006—TUPE—do not apply to the change of status, so my ten-minute Bill would also have allowed the transfer of employment status while protecting the employment rights of those employees as though TUPE actually applied. I am pleased that the Bill under consideration covers all aspects of that ten-minute Bill, and I thank the Government for listening to SORO, Unison and me, and to others who have been leading the campaign. My Bill received its First Reading on 23 November 2005, when the late Eric Forth, then Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, questioned its contents, although he did not call for a vote. On several Fridays at the end of 2005 and in the early months of 2006 when private Members’ Bills were before the House, he continued, as ever, to shout, ““Object”” when I tried to get a Second Reading for the Bill, despite the fact that the usual channels had agreed to allow the Bill to proceed to Committee. I thank the shadow Chancellors of the main Opposition parties and their deputies for agreeing to that. Unfortunately, shortly before Eric Forth’s tragic death, I gave the date for the Second Reading of my Bill as Friday 14 July 2006; it fell, of course. It is important that the changes in part 2 of the Bill under discussion are adopted because the civil registration service is about to undergo the greatest reform in its history. Most of its statutory officers are afraid that their employment rights are not protected ahead of those changes and that some local authorities might use the reforms ahead to unload staff in the absence of that protection. An ““efficiency scrutiny”” that was published as long ago as 1985 recommended the change in employment status for registrars and superintendent registrars, and Green and White Papers, published in 1988 and 1990 respectively, contained that proposal, but, sadly, the Marriage Act 1994 did not address the question. The Government began to consider reform of the civil registration service in 1998, when they published a consultation paper on supporting families. ““Registration: Modernising a Vital Service”” was published in late 1999 by the General Register Office as a serious consultation document, and it was followed in early 2002 by the White Paper ““Civil Registration: Vital Change””. In a further consultation paper, ““Civil Registration: Delivering Vital Change”” which was published in July 2003, the Treasury decided to consult further on bringing about reform of the civil registration service in England and Wales by using the regulatory reform order process that had been introduced in 2001. I felt that the proposed changes were so major that they should have been discussed on the Floor of the House, and I called for that at business questions and in other ways, but it was not to be. Not surprisingly in my opinion, the Regulatory Reform (Registration of Births and Deaths) (England and Wales) Order 2004, published in December of that year, was rejected in 2005 by the Regulatory Reform Committees of both Houses on the ground that the overall package of proposals was an inappropriate use of the powers of the Regulatory Reform Act 2001. The Regulatory Reform Committee of this House expressed concern"““at the exposure of the Registration Services to the wider pressures of local authority financing which the proposed Order would bring about””." It concluded:"““We consider that the Government should specifically provide for the consultation and protection of Registration Service Office-holders, as advocated by the Society of Registration Officers and Unison””." That RRO was the largest to be brought before the Committee to date, with 68 articles and 15 schedules, amending 20 Acts of Parliament. A second RRO was planned, on marriage, but was later dropped. Following two written statements by successive Financial Secretaries to the Treasury—on 1 March and 16 November 2005—and the failure of my Bill in the previous Session of Parliament, we are where we are today. Members will therefore appreciate that this group of employees has been extremely patient and looks forward to the success of the Bill before the House today. Indeed, SORO has evidence that the proposal to change the employment status of registrars and superintendent registrars goes back 60 years. It is ironic that, because of press criticism of the way in which statistics have been presented—by successive Governments—we are where we are today: delivering, we hope, the employment rights for registration officers for which we have campaigned for so long. In view of the events that I have just described, there should be no objections to part 2 of the Bill becoming law. Registrars and superintendent registrars have duties imposed on them by the Marriage Act 1949, the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953 and the Registration Service Act 1953, and this Bill allows them to retain those duties. Clause 65 establishes the registrar general for England and Wales as—I like this expression—““a corporation sole””, which separates the rights and liabilities of the post from the office holder. SORO and I have also proceeded with a parallel route to deal with the employment issues before us today. An opportunity was provided when the White Paper ““Fairness at Work”” was published in June 1998, which led to the Employment Relations Act 1999. Partly as a result of our lobbying the Department of Trade and Industry at the time, section 23 was inserted into that Act, which allows the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry to make an order, subject to the affirmative resolution procedure, to extend certain employment rights to persons who do not enjoy them. Section 23 was brought into force on 25 October 1999, and the Government issued a consultation document in July 2002. Section 23 was amended by the Employment Relations Act 2004. Office holders—otherwise known as statutory officers—include the clergy, registration officers, police officers, prison officers, trade union officers, club secretaries, company directors and trustees. The Government’s consultation document on section 23 admits that the position of registration officers in particular is extremely complex. House of Commons Library research paper 06/66, which I recommend to Members, attempts to explain those complexities on pages 90 to 91. The Government have decided that part 2 of the Bill goes further than would be possible if we applied section 23 of the 1999 Act to this problem. The Office for National Statistics also incorporates the General Register Office for England and Wales, whose functions are to be transferred elsewhere in Government, as we have heard. Although the Treasury is responsible for the GRO, there are several other possibilities, of which I suggest just one: that its functions be transferred to the Department for Communities and Local Government. I am not sure whether the Government are going to allow us to discuss this issue in Committee, but I hope so. The collection of official statistics in Britain has a long history, dating back to 1066 and the Domesday Book. In the middle ages, the churches began to record church baptisms, marriages and burials. Such record-keeping became compulsory in 1538, but it was not until 1837 that official statistics on births, marriages and deaths were collected centrally, as they still are. Today, the civil registration service has become responsible for the recording of stillbirths, adoptions and civil partnerships registered under the Civil Partnership Act 2004, which came into force in December 2005. It also advises the Home Office on the question of sham marriages. With the demographic changes that we have seen in recent times, with more mobility of families, not only across the UK but also across the world, and particularly with the advent of modern IT services, it is right and proper that the civil registration service should undergo its first major reform since 1837, and this Bill paves the way for that. The Bill will touch the lives of all our constituents, and I am pleased that we have been able to debate the collection of national statistics and the civil registration service today, ahead of the reforms of those services that are about to occur. I strongly welcome the Bill.