Statistics and Registration Service Bill

I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary mentioned the registration service. I thank hon. Members for not tabling amendments against that aspect of the Bill—not one amendment was tabled against that part of its contents. I shall be delighted on 9 May when I visit Leicester for the annual conference of the Society of Registration Officers, of which I am the patron for England and Wales. I have addressed nine previous conferences in all parts of the country. On occasion, I have had to hang my head down because I have been so full of excuses for why my Government have not delivered employment rights to the more than 1,700 registrars and superintendent registrars who work so ably across England and Wales in every register office, which all of us need to use—sometimes in tragic circumstances, but mainly in happy circumstances when we have births or marriages in the family. This year will be my 10th address. I will be delighted to say that my Government have at last delivered what registration service officers have been asking for—the chance to go to an employment tribunal if they are unfairly dismissed or sacked. It does happen. I have seen some sad cases where people have had to leave the service under a cloud and they have not had the rights that nearly all other workers have throughout the land. As my hon. Friend said, registration officers are employed, appointed and housed in offices. Those offices are sometimes not very good. The office in Bolton is now delightful, although it did not used to be. The pensions are also provided by local authorities. It is therefore proper that the responsibility for discipline should move to the control of local authorities. The Society of Registration Officers has been asking for that for a long time, and recently it has been supported by Unison. Those people who have been campaigning with me for that, and those who have been campaigning at the Local Authorities Co-ordinators of Regulatory Services as well, will be delighted by this evening’s events. On a lighter side, it was a privilege to listen to hon. Members who know far more than I do about statistics. I learned a lot during the course of the Bill’s passage through Committee. It occasionally got difficult to listen, though, so I started to count the number of times that people tripped over the word ““statistics””, and particularly over the word ““statistical””. I commend the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers)—she tripped over the word ““statistical”” only once this evening. I am concerned, however, about the Bill’s passage in the other place because there are more dentures there. I imagine that when Members in the House of Lords start to pronounce those words, false teeth might flow all over the Chamber. I have lobbied a lot of Ministers and I have been travelling on two parallel tracks. One is with the Department of Trade and Industry—I will not deal with that now—which is where the responsibility for employment legislation lies. The other relates to my lobbying of successive Economic and Financial Secretaries who have been responsible for the part of the Office for National Statistics that concerns me. I commend my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary, who has listened not only to me but to Unison and the Society of Registration Officers, and has allowed us to deliver something extremely important to more than 1,700 people who have awaited this legislation for some time. My own detailed history of involvement in the issue dates back to 1985. I shall not bore Members with it this evening, but it has been a long battle. SORO’s campaign dates back even further—it has waited a very long time for this moment. The Bill does something more important than delivering what I have described; it also paves the way for the first major reform of the civil registration service since the service was set up as long ago as 1837. I think that all Members would agree that it is time the service was brought into the 21st century, as I am sure it will be. What worried registration officers was the possibility that as we reformed the service, local authorities might realise that they needed fewer of them. Some battles, in my view unnecessary, might have arisen as a result of that. However, as we have now given registration officers the right to go to an industrial tribunal, if local authorities try to remove them from their posts they will feel far more confident about the major reforms of the civil registration service that are just around the corner. The Treasury tried to initiate some of those reforms through a regulatory reform order, the largest ever committed to the new Committee that came into being in 2001 under the Regulatory Reform Act of that year. Sadly, under the chairmanship of Peter Pike, the former Member of Parliament for Burnley, the Committee rejected the move. I know that my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary now intends to use secondary legislation as a way of reforming the service. I thank my hon. Friend, and I look forward with confidence—as, I am sure, do SORO and Unison—to reform of a service that has long been in need of reform.