Births and Deaths Registration (Amendment) (Hansard, 6 July 1993)

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953 in relation to the place of registration of deaths in England and Wales.

The Bill would amend the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953 to enable deaths to be registered in any district in England and Wales, not simply, as at present, in the district where the death occurred.

One might have thought that a death could be registered with any recognised registrar, but that is not so, as I discovered from an elderly constituent of mine, a lady in her 70s, living in Chester, whose 95-year-old mother died in a nursing home in Kent. To register the death, my constituent, the only surviving relative, was obliged to travel hundreds of miles, at considerable expense and inconvenience, at a time of great personal sadness, to complete a bureaucratic formality which could equally well have been undertaken in Chester.

The lady's case may be unusual, but is by no means unique. The National Consumer Council has alerted me to a comparable case in which a daughter had to register her mother's death in Ely, because the nursing home in which the lady's mother died fell within the Ely district, although the nursing home was closer to Cambridge, where the funeral was to take place, while the bereaved daughter lived in Worcester.

The registrar would not have welcomed registration of the death either by the proprietor of the nursing home or by the undertaker, so one afternoon the daughter travelled from Worcester to Ely for that purpose, only to discover, when she got there, that the registrar's office was open for business from 9 am until noon only, and on just three days a week.

While it is obviously gratifying for the good people of East Anglia to feel that the rate of mortality in Ely is such that it justifies a week of only nine hours on the part of the registrar, it is clearly absurd, and in truth unnecessary, for people already having to cope with the trauma of bereavement, perhaps involved in the making of funeral arrangements, and possibly elderly themselves, to have this additional administrative burden thrust upon them.

In the age of the telephone and the fax, it must make sense to introduce a system whereby a death can be registered in any district in any part of the country, thus relieving bereaved people of the difficulty and the expense of travelling to the district where the death occurred. It must make sense.

Indeed, as we can see, it does make sense, which is why a benevolent Government made such a proposal in the White Paper on registration back in January 1990, with a promise of legislation at "an early opportunity". Three and a half years later, that early opportunity has still failed to present itself, which is where I and my Bill step in.

Having been a Member of the House for only about 15 months, I pride myself on still being loosely in touch with reality. Unjust as it may seem to Members of Parliament, there are in the real world some who look on our proceedings with a mixture of scorn and incredulity.

They partially understand our role in the constituency as that odd amalgam of citizens advice bureau, untrained Relate counsellor, housing officer, doormat, punchbag 187 and inveterate function attender with an insatiable appetite for finger food and raffle tickets. But to many of them our purpose at Westminster is less clear. This weekend, one of my constituents said to me, "What do you MPs do?" Before I had a chance to offer a dignified reply, he went on, "Whatever it is, I wish you would do less of it."

I believe in less legislation, less regulation and less bureaucracy, and in the validity of William Blake's dictum that he who would do good must do it by minute particulars. My Bill is a very modest measure. It is not significant. It is not spectacular. It is not even controversial. It will not make a noise, but to a few people it might make a difference. That is why I commend it to the House.