HL Deb 16 December 1974 vol 355 cc1010-31

7.20 p.m.

Lord TEVIOT rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether in the light of their recent statement they could consider further the essential need to keep to the Public Search Room of the Registrar General's Department in Central London. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. But before doing so I must apologise for keeping noble Lords away from the party of the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, one of the most distinguished Parliamentarians of this century. The last three noble Lords who have spoken on their Orders have been like the three green bottles, but I am afraid that I shall be a green bottle in a concrete casing and I apologise if I keep any noble Lords waiting. I must declare an interest in this matter, in that I earn part of my living from making searches in the Public Search Room of the Registrar General's office at St. Catherine's House. The reason for asking this Question will now appear extremely obvious to your Lord-ships, but I can qualify this by saying that there will be many others affected by the move of the whole Department if the move from London to Southport takes place.

As your Lordships may know, the Registrar General's Department was founded in 1837 as a result of legislation as early as 17th August 1836, and Section 2 of the Act covering the registration of births, deaths and marriages in England stated: And be it enacted that it shall be lawful for His Majesty to provide an office in London or Westminster to be called the General Register Office. His Majesty was, of course, King William IV. Unfortunately, that part of the Act was repealed in 1953; if it had not been repealed I should have been speaking to an Amendment Bill instead of asking an Unstarred Question—but never mind, my Lords.

Until January of this year, the office was housed at Somerset House and it was by that name that the Department was known throughout the English speaking world. Anyone who visited Somerset House for one reason or another—whether a resident of this country or from overseas—was struck dumb by the magnificence of this building, which is undoubtedly one of the finest in London. People instantly became more proud of their English or Welsh heritage——

Lord MOWBRAY and STOURTON

Or Scots.

Lord TEVIOT

My Lords, I must correct my noble friend and tell him that that office is in Edinburgh. But people became more proud when they realised that the personal particulars of either themselves or their forefathers were lodged there. After nearly 137 years, this Department was literally thrown out to a modern building nearby. The art experts felt that the rooms were far too good for a Civil Service Department and would be better used as a museum. The Churchill Exhibition has been there this year and I believe that a theatrical museum will take its place. There was absolutely no credit given to a famous Department which had spent nearly one and a half centuries there: instead there was a victory for the purveyors of culture—here I must say I am not against the patrons of the Arts, but sometimes their self-importance is rather accentuated—who managed to evict some civil servants.

In 1972, I was concerned with the future of the Public Search Room and this prompted me to ask a Question as to where the Department was being moved, in order to dispel a rumour that it was going to the suburbs. The reply given by my noble friend Lord Sandford—who, unfortunately, is not here today but is happily replaced by my noble friend Lady Young, who I am sure will do justice to this Question—was that it was going to St. Catherine's House at the corner of Aldwych and Kingsway and that that place would be its permanent home.

I may mention here that St. Catherine's House is only 300 yards from the original Somerset House. I, and many others, were greatly relieved by this move and were told that the facilities would be very much improved and that there would be more room in which to make searches. I will not speak about that but as a result, willingly or unwillingly—because there were some of us who had more than a sneaking regard for the garret in Somerset House—we all made it our business to make ourselves at home at St. Catherine's House.

At this point, I should like to paint a picture of some of the people who use the Public Search Room. I am not placing them in any order of importance and I shall begin by mentioning the Foreign and Commonwealth guests, as it is polite to do so. All the year round, overseas visitors from the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and many other countries and colonies come to this country in order to find out where they came from and to trace their pedigrees. They consider this very important as they naturally like to have some roots in this country, however long ago their ancestors emigrated. It can be fairly certain that genealogy brings considerable trade to the tourist industry in this country, especially in London. Besides tourists, one sees many familiar faces in the Search Room, who are known as regulars and professionals and who may be connected with either the legal profession or genealogy. Some spend all their working hours there, while some spend time in the record repository as well.

Here I will slightly diverge. Genealogists, in order to pursue their searches from 1837 and onwards, need the Public Record Office in order to find the census returns and also for naval and military searches. That is only five minutes away. Also they need wills, which are to be found in the Principal Probate Registry in the old Somerset House; and lawyers—and I will come to them later—need Companies House which is in City Road, where some records will remain while others will be in Cardiff. Then there are people, including the noble Lord who will kindly answer this Question—and I apologise for the fact that I have not yet mentioned his kindness in waiting—who regard it as a right of people to enter the Public Search Room.

I must now break down those categories. The first is the amateur genealogist, of which there are many of all ages, from the age of about eight to 80 and probably beyond, who is pursuing details of his own family. The second and largest group are men and women who need their birth certificates for such essential purposes as pensions or passports. That group I will come to later. Then there is the third and probably the most important group in this context, the people who have never really known who they are or to whom they belong. They may be those who were adopted; they may be those who were foundlings; they may by those who were orphans, and at some point in their lives they go to St. Catherine's House—previously, Somerset House—and perhaps the officials there do not really appreciate how many of these people there are. I have been there regularly for four or five years, and there are also many others. These people come in with extremely sad problems and they want to know these facts. One cannot do very much for them, but they can look into the books and feel that there is something tangible that they can get down to. Some people spend a great number of years, and others just a few months, and they dig out details of a relative which they consider to be extremely important.

I now come to the question of moving to Southport, which is really the main point of this Question. Southport is a famous resort in North-West England, in Lancashire now known as Mersey-side—North of Liverpool. It is also a residential area and an important Merseyside suburb. I do not want to denigrate Southport at all, but it is 210 miles from the capital. The journey by rail, according to the ABC, is extremely inconvenient. If people want to go there for the day, they will have to catch a train at 8 o'clock in the morning from Euston, change at Wigan, North-West, walk down the road to Wigan, Wallgate, and catch a stopping train to Southport, arriving there at 11.32.

My first question to the Minister, which is not the most important, is: how far will the proposed building be from Southport railway station? If the office closes at 4.30, the first available train will be the 6.10 from Southport, which again means 45 minutes in Wigan, reaching London at 10.2. The fare is £11.5. Experts in transport will realise that this journey can be made quicker by catching a train to Liverpool and either walking three-quarters of a mile through Liverpool streets, or going by public transport or taking a taxi and then catching a fast train to London. But our foreign guests will have no idea about this facility.

As I said earlier, as well as doing this most people would have to consult the Principal Probate Registry, the Public Record Office, the British Museum and Companies House. The alternative to travelling would be to employ someone locally, or to correspond with the Department direct. Here I would ask the noble Lord two pertinent questions. The first is, how many people use this Department, either daily or weekly? How many people enter St. Catherine's House? I believe it is in terms of thousands. To hazard a guess, I would say the number is in the region of 5,000. The second point is: how many certificates are produced daily or yearly, and what is the revenue of that Department for certificates over the counter? I feel that this is extremely important.

I am now asking whether the Department will be equipped to handle the enormous number of increased postal applications? Formerly one of the cheapest things one could use was the post; but now it is extremely expensive, and trying to organise a postal department is very difficult indeed.

One then comes to the matter of getting people to search for birth, marriage and death certificates. At the moment the Department employs clerical assistants to do that job which I think is accepted in the Civil Service as a junior grade. I am not denigrating them, but I should like to put forward to your Lordships that this is an extremely expert job. If it is for yourself, you have the knowledge. If you want to look up your own birth certificate, you know the year you are born and probably the month and where you were born. You would just reach for the book and look for it. But that is often not the case. People do not really know what happened. It is also a fact that the records run from 1837 onwards.

I come to the question of name. A large proportion of the population were illiterate, some even unable to write their own names. They had to state their names to the best of their ability to the registrar, who may equally have got it wrong, and some names became rather more obscure than might otherwise have been the case. An easy example is those names with an "e" or without an "e". This is not an affectation; names were far more likely to have an "e" in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries than they are now. The name "Humphreys" is a very common example. I think there are at least eight different ways of spelling it—"Humphreys", "Humphries", "Hum-fries", "Humfreys" and several more with which I shall not bore your Lord-ships. There is the name "Shepherd". Your Lordships could give other splendid examples. Of the less obscure names, "Cockcroft" is quite often spelt "C-o-c-k-r-o-f-t". A less obscure name is Dytham, which may be spelt "D-i-t-a-m", and there are variants such as "D-i-g-h-t-a-m" and so on. I do not think one can expect a clerical assistant or any person in the Civil Service to be able to seek the information necessary with the complete expertise that is required.

For people searching for information regarding a marriage, the Registrar General's Department agrees for an extremely modest fee to look for five years for a marriage. But quite often the difference between the youngest child and the eldest child is 25 years. A mother may have been married at 16 or 17, have her first child at 18 or 19, and the poor woman is still having children at 43, 44 or 45. So there can be a long period of searching through these books. This I have done myself, with my wife; we have looked over 25 years, and the record has been 31 years.

This is an extremely complex business. One might be searching for the date of somebody's death and might look for the time when that person was last heard of, which might have been when one child was christened. Then you look to "kill" them off. If they live a very long time, as they do now, the period covered might be one of 40 to 50 years. This type of service being dealt with by correspondence is extremely difficult. I was talking to an eminent professor who married a Czech wife four or five years ago, and in the last four years he has had to make two dozen visits to St. Catherine's House, and previously to Somerset House, to go through all the formalities. Is this kind of thing to be dealt with at Southport? This office is part of our heritage, part of our essential life, and it should be kept in London.

I come now to the Hardman Report. I have been speaking for quite a long time, but now I will be much more specific. On page 174 of the Hardman Report, Section 4 states: If the office is dispersed in order to avoid almost certain loss of many of its trained survey practitioners and of medical statisticians, neither of whom could be replaced quickly if at all, the office woud probaby need to retain a number of such posts in London together with a handful of other senior posts, the Public Search Room, a few registration consultants and some limited support staff. The total number which the office would wish to retain in London would be up to one hundred posts. I should like to ask another question of the noble Lord. If it had been suggested to Sir Henry Hardman that the Public Search Room could not be kept in London, would he have suggested that the office would be readily dispersable to Southport?

Finally, I would say in winding up that I am not alone in asking this Question. For once we have not got a lawyer present among us to ask questions. I am pleased to see many of my noble friends here who are very concerned; the genealogists and the College of Arms are also very concerned. I would ask, in all fairness and with no malice at all, whether the noble Lord's right honourable friend would think again if the decision has been taken to move the whole of this Department to Southport. With all respect to the Registrar General and his deputy, it might be very awkward to split the Department. If the Department cannot be split, I would ask whether he could keep the whole thing in London. It is essential for the people of this country and people from overseas that this Department remains in Central London.

7.39 p.m.

Lord PLATT

My Lords, the procedure for Unstarred Questions is in many ways unsatisfactory. One of the unfortunate things about it is that one is speaking to a House which is not, perhaps, as full as it is at normal Question Time at 2.30 in the afternoon. Also, one has to make one's speech on the assumption that the noble Lord who is kindly going to reply will give a most unsatisfactory reply, otherwise one is not quite sure why one is asking the question. In fact, one almost assumes that the reply will be unsatisfactory, because otherwise I take it that he would have had a private word with the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, and said, "There is no need to ask this Question, everything is going to be all right, the Government have thought again, and they are doing something sensible about it". So I apologise in advance to the noble Lord, Lord Wells-Pestell, who is to reply if my remarks seem to be a little hostile, because they are based on the assumption that he will tell us something not very satisfactory.

My Lords, on 28th November, the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, asked a Starred Question and in reply the noble Lord, Lord Wells-Pestell, among other things, said: … the Government are well aware of the importance of the Research Room and the useful purpose it serves in a number of fields."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 28/11/74; c. 1492.] The noble Lord went on to speak of discussions with the Genealogical Society and the Law Society and said that the Government proposed to have discussions with other interested bodies. He also said: It is recognised there is a very strong case for research taking place in London", and that he would be in a better position to say later on what was the outcome of the discussions. I then asked him whether, having waited for the outcome of the discussions it would be too late to influence the Government? To this he replied, not very satisfactorily: It could be too late, but in point of fact, as the noble Lord knows, it is open to any noble Lord to ask the Government what is happening."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 28/11/74; col. 1493.] That is all very well, but do we ask once a week, or once a month? Will the decision suddenly be taken behind our backs, while we are not looking, while we are in Recess?

My Lords, assuming an unsatisfactory answer—which again I apologise for in advance because I am hoping it will be something quite different—I propose to ask a number of questions which I have modestly cut down to nine. They are all quite simple questions, and I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Wells-Pestell, will have the answer to each of them. First of all, can he tell us, in a relatively few words, what is to be gained by this proposed move? Secondly, are all the decisions already taken? Thirdly, what were the views of the Genealogical Society, the Law Society and the other bodies? Which were the other bodies?—historians, perhaps, biographers, the College of Heralds, and possibly the Guild-hall; I do not know.

My fourth question is as follows: do Her Majesty's Government realise the value of the Public Search Room to the hosts of professional and amateur researchers at home and abroad? This has already been emphasised by the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, and I do not propose to say anything more at length about it except to stress the role of the amateur, of which I am one. I am deeply interested in certain genealogical problems, particularly of my own and of my wife's families.

It would be quite impossible to get professionals to do all the chores which I am prepared to do myself, because I do not think they would do them well enough to tell me the honest truth. I am sure they would give me the best possible answer to a straight question, but the kind of question that the amateur has to deal with is not so straight. The amateur has to ask himself, "When was Aunt Molly born? If we could find this out—it might be anywhere between 1851 and 1857—we might manage to obtain particulars of where her parents were living. If we obtain those, we could go to the Census Office and find out—if it was the Census of 1851 or later—where her father was born. This would help us to know where that branch of the family came from." This is the kind of thing that one has to do either for oneself, or one must put as much money in the pool as is necessary, because one cannot expect professionals to do hours of work and charge nothing at all, even if the whole of their researches turn out to be negative.

My Lords, the fifth question I have dealt with. It was the question of an amateur conducting his own researches and the impossibility of an amateur himself going to Southport, or conducting a lengthy postal research. Question six is partly covered already, so I will not make too much of it. Are Her Majesty's Government aware that the researches may take one from deaths to marriages, to the Guildhall, to Lambeth Palace, and especially the Department of the wills, the more recent of which used to be in Somerset House. The older ones are in the Public Record Office. Wills are often more easily found than certain other records. From there, one's researches could take one to the Census Department. At the moment, we have the enormous advantage that all these places are in one city. I am sure that the only city in this country in which those places could be would be London, or, with reference to Scottish genealogy, Edinburgh.

My Lords, with regard to question seven, could the noble Lord tell us how he sees an amateur like myself conducting these researches if half the Departments are moved to Southport? As a matter of practicalities, how would one do it? I have no answer to it. My eighth question is this: if this is to be a partial move, which parts of the Registrar General's Department will be moved? I can see that whenever there is a new decennial census with all the statistics which have to be worked out from it, a great deal of the census work is backroom stuff. So far as I can see, it does not matter very much whether this work is done in Southport, Newcastle, Cardiff, or elsewhere. I have tried to stress the interlocking importance of the Census—the births, marriages and deaths, the wills, the Guildhall records, the Lambeth Palace records, and so on.

My Lords, my question nine is a question about Wigan, which the noble Lord, Lord Tcviot, has already asked for me. Personally, I cannot "fork out" £11 and the time to go to Southport, only to come back and say, "Oh, my goodness!, while I was there I should have looked for so-and-so; I will have to go again tomorrow." Everybody who does genealogical research knows that this is the kind of thing which happens, I will not say every day, but it does happen. The more expert one becomes, the less often it happens. I am not making academic points, but describing without exaggeration some of the researches I have made for my own interest among the records which we are so pleased and proud to find in this City.

7.48 p.m.

Lord MOWBRAY and STOURTON

My Lords, I apologise because I have not put down my name to speak. I told the noble Lord the Minister who is to reply that I might "chip in". Knowing my great interest in the subject, my noble friend Lord Teviot drew my attention to this Unstarred Question only about one hour ago. So I feel slightly guilty because I did not read the Order Paper thoroughly enough to realise that this Question was coming. However, I know enough about the procedures of this subject to feel moderately strongly about it, as does my noble friend Lord Teviot and the noble Lord, Lord Platt, because I, too, am an amateur genealogist, interested in this subject.

I can totally confirm, for instance, the questions that arise in facing problems of spelling. I have only to look at my own name. Although in the 1400s Henry VI created a peerage of Stourton spelled in one way, in the 1660s we have signatures spelled "Stirton" and "Sturton". Henry VI and the family in the 1400s spelled it "Stourton", which we still do. The noble Lord, Lord Platt, made a very telling point when he mentioned this question of going to one place to look for what you want, then going somewhere else and finding that what you want is not there and having to go back again.

I am all for dispersal of Government Departments throughout the country to give them a fair share of these Ministerial outposts of civilisation, not only because it may be good for the Provinces to feel that they are sharing in Government, but also to disperse them out of London which is overcrowded. But there is all the difference in the world between this proposal and dispersing Ministries and civil servants dealing with transport or agriculture, who can do their job equally well there provided they find houses and so on. This does not apply to an office such as we are talking about now, which is used by the public.

Let me pay homage to Southport; I am in no way denigrating it. I have very happy memories of being given an excellent lunch by the mayor and corporation when I visited them in connection with their home improvement campaign. I might say that Southport has one of the best housing records in Lancashire, and I was very impressed by the fact that they were having a housing improvement campaign. But we already have pensions at Lytham St. Anne's. If one has to be fitted with limbs one also goes there. I went there just after the war when I was trying to fit an eye in my socket. We also have income tax people there, and Lancashire has already had people sent there. No doubt Southport would welcome them.

As my noble friend Lord Teviot has pointed out, in London everything is centralised for the scholar, for the legal expert needing to find something, for the serious student from abroad. We have the British Museum, the Society of Genealogists with their unparalleled library dealing with these matters, and all the Harleian manuscripts dealing with parish registers and records, and there is the College of Arms with its incomparable records. Scholars need to jump about from one place to another; they are here today and there tomorrow, or here this morning and there in the afternoon. They cannot say, "Let us take a journey to Southport this afternoon and come back"; they will need to be millionaires.

This is an office which is already used by people. As we have heard, the wills are still staying at Somerset House. This office is not to be compared with the part of the National Library which is chiefly for vetting purposes, and which is going to Boston Spa in Yorkshire. That is not visited every day by scholars. I should like the noble Lord to give us the answer to the very important question he has been asked: how many people are using this record office?

My noble friend Lord Teviot twitted me about the fact that the Scots have their place in Edinburgh. I think my noble friend has forgotten that one of the best known exports from Scotland to England and to our Empire, when we had an Empire, was its sons and daughters. Where India and the East India Company would have been without Scotsmen to help them manage their affairs, I do not know. Indeed, ever since the reign of James VI, or James I as he was here, Scots have been regularly supplying manpower, brainpower, energies and skills to London and other parts of the British Empire. These Scotsmen, when they came back from far off overseas posts, very often settled in London. If you look through the London registers, you will find lots of Scots names. That is why I said "and Scots" to my noble friend. Lots of the descendants of these Scots later stayed in Australia and Canada. They came back in one generation and then their children went out in another generation. This applies to Irishmen, too. They quite often did a sojourn in London before going off in the 19th century to the United States or wherever it was.

I think I have made all the points I want to make. This is a question of being practical, and it is important to students. Many tourists who come to Britain have a secondary object of trying to find out something. If this sort of record office is sent to Southport, a disservice will be done to this country.

7.56 p.m.

Baroness YOUNG

My Lords, I wish to intervene briefly in this debate to support most warmly the remarks of my noble friend Lord Teviot on his Unstarred Question this evening. I am speaking, as he has already said, in the place of my noble friend Lord Sandford who is, unfortunately, unable to be present this evening. I am very glad to support my noble friend Lord Teviot, because it seems to me that he has made out an extraordinarily good case for keeping the Public Search Room of the Registrar General's Department located in Central London. I cannot give anything like the detail which he has put in his argument, nor indeed as was put in the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Platt. I should, therefore, like to concentrate my remarks on two main points.

My noble friend Lord Teviot, has been interested in this matter for some time. As he said, he asked a similar Question on Wednesday, 13th September 1972 about the search facilities of the Registrar General's Office and he was given an assurance—at column 324 of Hansard—by my noble friend Lord Sandford in these terms: I imagine that the object of my noble friend's Question was to seek from me an assurance, which I am glad to give, that for the convenience of those who wish to attend on the Registrar General for certificates and research facilities the office should be in central London, and it will be. That seems to me to be an absolutely clear-cut statement. Although, of course, I will accept it if I am told I am wrong, I have been unable to find any suggestion of any intervening statement to disprove or in any way to cast doubt upon what my noble friend Lord Sandford said on that occasion.

It seems to me a very serious matter if the noble Lord, Lord Wells-Pestell, is unable to give a similar assurance, and if an assurance from a Government Minister—on something which is not a matter of Party political policies and therefore liable to be changed at a General Election or with the swing of political opinion—is changed after only two years of its being made. Everybody understands that in the course of 20 or 25 years views and policies change, but I should have thought one could expect a policy to remain the same for two years. Therefore, it seems to me a very serious matter if its validity is in doubt. This seems to me an important point, because I read with great care what the noble Lord, Lord Wells-Pestell, said on Thursday, 28th November. I will not quote it because it has already been quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Platt. Having looked at it carefully, he seems to have cast doubt on this, and I think what we need to be sure about tonight is where we stand on this matter.

The second point that I wish to make is that the real argument about keeping search facilities in London, and keeping that part of the Registrar General's Office in London dealing with birth, death and marriage certificates, is its importance to the people. Everybody who has had any experience in public life talks about the well-known phrase, "people matter". I doubt whether there is one of us who has ever made any kind of political speech who has not used this phrase, and I have no doubt, in using it, has meant every word that he has said. Here, of course, we are being asked to stand up and be counted on a particular issue, because although it matters enormously to the staff of the Registrar General's office whether they are in London or South-port, or in, I believe, two of the other possible places to which they might go, where these offices are is also extremely important to members of the public. It is important for all the reasons that have been so well explained: the fact that because the offices are easily accessible it helps tourists and the amateur and professional geneologists. I would add only one more reason for keeping the offices in London; that is, that it seems to me that in this ever-increasingly complex society in which we live, the demand for keeping copies of vital certificates is likely to increase and not decrease.

It seems to me that the public ought to be helped in this matter. I make this as a very real, practical point, because it was often put to me when I was in local government that it was easy enough for some people to write letters to the town hall for the information they wanted, but many people find it much more difficult, and therefore it is often necessary for someone to go in person to collect a certificate. It is often much easier for them to do so, and we have an obligation to make everything as easy as we can for members of the public.

In the short time that I have had to prepare for this Unstarred Question, I regret to say that I have not had the opportunity of studying the Hardman Report in the detail that I should have liked. I of course read the relevant section on the population censuses and surveys, and I came across the quotation that my noble friend Lord Teviot used. But it seems to me that when there is a Government Report on the location of offices which in fact recommends that the public search rooms should remain in Central London, we must pay heed to what it says.

I also looked in the Hardman Report at the table of travelling times, because although everybody has talked about the difficulty of getting from London to Southport—which I have no doubt is very great—one has to remember that not everybody is going to use London as a starting point. When we come to look at the tables in Appendix 11 on how to get from one place to another, it is relatively straightforward if one is starting from London. But if one is starting from Cornwall, Yorkshire, somewhere in the Midlands, or even from Sussex, it is going to be infinitely more difficult. One has to remember, after all, that most people live outside London. I have no idea of the breakdown of the figures of visitors, but it is a serious matter that road, rail and public transport services link direct to London. It is the easiest place for most people to get to from any part of the country. As soon as a vital office is moved somewhere else, automatically it makes it more difficult for people.

I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Wells-Pestell, who I know will have listened with great care to all the points that have been made, will realise that this is a serious matter. I think that it will cause considerable worry to large numbers of professional people and to members of the public if they realise exactly what is happening. At a time when we are suffering so many economic difficulties, it would be most regrettable to put any further difficulty in the way of the tourist industry which, after all, is a great invisible export earner and therefore a help to us all.

8.5 p.m.

Lord WELLS-PESTELL

My Lords, I want to say at the beginning that this debate makes a very useful contribution to the consideration which is being given to this matter at the present moment. Let me say right at the start that no decisions at all have been made—and I would not make that statement if I believed otherwise. I understand—and I have been at some pains to find out—that no decisions have been made. I shall try to indicate why this matter is being considered at all. The Hardman Report has been mentioned, and the noble Baroness drew attention to the statement made by the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, on 13th September 1972, when he gave a firm assurance that there would not be any move in the future. I should like to point out that that statement was made on 13th September 1972, almost a year before the Hardman Report came out, and I want to remind your Lordships that the whole purpose of the Hardman Report was to consider the dispersal of Government work from London.

So far as this matter is concerned, it has to be seen in the light of the need to disperse some of the Government work in London. May I say—and I say it very sincerely—that the Government are concerned with the views of a number of people and a number of organisations, and are mindful of what the noble Lord and the noble Baroness have already drawn to our attention; that is, the comment and observation of Sir Henry Hardman himself. He did not recommend that the Public Search Room remain. What he said was that the office would probably need to retain—and the word is "probably"—a number of such posts in London, together with a handful of other senior posts, the Public Search Room and so on.

Perhaps the noble Lord may think that I am splitting hairs, but the fact remains that Sir Henry Hardman has produced a Report in which he indicates that dispersal of the Office of Population and Censuses and Surveys to some other part of the country is necessary. Noble Lords may well ask the reason for this. I want only to indicate what is behind this, again reiterating that no decisions have been made, and again reiterating that the Public Search Room, for all I know, may remain, and to give your Lordships some idea of the thinking behind it.

I think that most of your Lordships will agree that Government offices and employment are concentrated far too much in London. Over a good many years we have pursued a policy of dispersal. There is a great deal of cost in maintaining both buildings and staff in London in terms of overheads. We have to face the fact that there is real difficulty of recruitment for staff in London. The situation is getting even more acute. At the moment we have about 935 members of staff of the OPCS in Southport; in fact the whole of the National Health Service Central Register of Doctors and Patients is kept there, as are the research people who produce information from those records. We have from the OPCS about 891 members of staff at Tichfield which is situated, as your Lordships may know, between Southampton and Portsmouth, who are engaged in processing statistics of births, deaths and marriages and where we have the Census staff. In London we have 988 members of staff and the Government's proposal, which is being considered at the moment, is to move some 500 of them to the Southport area, although the Hardman Report suggests that the entire 900-odd be moved, with the exception of the 100 to which Sir Henry Hardman refers.

Lord TEVIOT

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord very much. But I am not splitting hairs on the differences in the Hardman Report. I am well aware of that aspect. The question I asked was whether it would have created a different complex if the Public Search Room was moved and whether he might have expressed his Report in other terms. But when the noble Lord talks about the Office of Population, Census and Surveys, and about figures in Southport and in Tichfield, I remind him that my Question concerns the old Registrar General's Department. That is the matter about which we are asking. Those are the posts with which we are concerned—not about the medical survey, statistics or anything else. I ask the noble Lord, with the greatest respect, to keep on the section which was the old Registrar General's Department of Births, Deaths and Marriages.

Lord WELLS-PESTELL

But the noble Lord will know that this is all part of the OPCS.

Lord TEVIOT

Yes, my Lords, it is all part, but I am talking about the stalk and not its stems. The kernel of the matter about which we ask concerns the whole trunk of the tree, not all its branches.

Lord WELLS-PESTELL

I appreciate that, but what I am trying to point out to the noble Lord is that the Registrar General's Department, to which he refers, is part of the OPCS, and the Hardman Report recommends the remaining 900-odd staff be transferred or dispersed to Southport, with the exception, as he says, of roughly 100 posts which will meet the needs of the Public Search Room, the support staff and so on.

I wanted to give noble Lords the present position because the decision as to which Department and staff go to South-port has in fact yet to be made. But I think that I must be honest and say that in making these decisions one has to take into account a number of factors. One has to take into account the effect such a move may have on the staff. We must face the fact that it will have an adverse effect on some members of staff. We have to take into account the effect on the community. I would not pretend for one moment that if one were to move the Registrar General's office to Southport it would not have an adverse effect on the community. I am sure that it would in a good many respects. We have to take into account the various matters which have been raised tonight, and the effect that the move will have on other bodies. We have to take into account the view of these other bodies. The noble Lord and I certainly know that the other bodies that have been consulted are certainly not in favour of dispersal. They are very much in favour of retaining the status quo.

Lord TEVIOT

My Lords, at this moment will the noble Lord, Lord Wells- Pestell, please say which bodies have been consulted? I believe that the Society of Genealogists were consulted in the sense that when they went to see the Department about something else they were told about this proposal. But at the present moment I do not think that any other bodies have yet been consulted. Can the noble Lord say which bodies have been consulted? I should be most interested.

Lord WELLS-PESTELL

My Lords, will the noble Lord allow me to come to that matter in a moment, because I believe I can answer all the questions that the noble Lord, Lord Platt, has put to me. I intended to mention them in any case. We also have to take into account the general effect on efficiency and convenience. We would accept that if these proposals were carried out there would be a threat to efficiency, certainly for the time being. The noble Lord, Lord Teviot, and the noble Baroness, Lady Young, asked me a number of questions about the use of the Public Search Room. I think I am right in saying that about 3,700 persons use it every week. This means that roughly a similar number of certificates are issued. But I think noble Lords must bear in mind that while about 3,700 certificates are issued every week, about twice that number a week are issued as a result of postal applications and postal requests. So roughly one-third of the certificates are issued as a result of people calling and twice as many are issued as a result of postal application.

Lord PLATT

My Lords, I am sorry to intervene. If you go there yourself, you are often quite satisfied with what you get and you do not ask for a certificate. I should think that the majority of people do not ask for certificates. I should say that these statistics we are receiving are useless. It is the same in the Wills Department. You can go there and look up for yourself the reference number and wait no longer than three or five minutes for the will to be brought. You read it and then give it back. Only in most exceptional circumstances do you ever ask for a copy.

Lord WELLS-PESTELL

My Lords, I think we can only go on the sort of statistics that we have. Perhaps your Lordships will allow me to correct one Statement which I made because I have misled the House. What I ought to have said was that there are a similar number of certificates issued as a result of postal application as there are from the number who visit. So the number of people——

Lord MOWBRAY and STOURTON

My Lords, as the point of the noble Lord, Lord Platt, is not being accepted by the noble Lord, with respect may I say that he started off by referring to 3,700 people a week and then went on to qualify that as being certificates and then said half of those were postal. But I would totally support the view of the noble Lord, Lord Platt, that a large number of people go there to look up a particular fact or facts, find things for themselves and go away. I should like the noble Lord, Lord Wells-Pestell, to agree that the number of 3,700 is totally irrelevant to the number of people using this office every day.

Lord WELLS-PESTELL

My Lords, let us be frank about this. It is easy to say that a vast army of people use a place and do not ask for certificates. Nobody knows whether a vast army of people go in and ask to see this and that and do not ask for a certificate. All we know is that a number of people use the Public Search Room to look at documents. We know roughly the number of people who go in every week and I have given the figure of 3,700. About 3,700 certificates are issued and in addition a similar number are applied for by post and are issued in that way. I do not think that we can state a figure because nobody knows the number of people who go in and do not ask for a certificate but merely look at a record. It always suits an argument for people to say, "a large number" or "a vast number". We can work only from the figures that we know.

I think we also have to face the fact that the majority of callers' needs could be met as easily by post; and in a large number of instances the information they get from St. Catherine's House could be obtained by applying to the local registrar. I will accept the fact that one cannot get information from a local registrar unless, of course, one knows that the person about whom one needs a certificate or information lived in a certain area and was therefore recorded there. But a large number of people who are making applications of this kind know where a person originally lived or was born.

Lord TEVIOT

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way, and, with deference to the Deputy Chief Whip, I really must put this point. The noble Lord was saying that people know the registration district. I can tell your Lord-ships that this is not so. There have been such movements in this country that one gets very surprising results. One might expect people to turn up in the East End of London and then be very surprised when they turn up on the Borders of Scotland near to Penrith, or on the coast of Cornwall or somewhere else. It is not a question of knowing where they come from—and there are about 500 registration districts.

Lord WELLS-PESTELL

My Lords, I think we are straining, shall I say, the Rules of the House. I do not really object to letting other noble Lords intervene if it seems to me that there is a valid point, but I do not think we can carry on the debate in the way in which we have been carrying it on. I have said that decisions have yet to be made. I have tried to point out to the House that we are very well seized of all the arguments. We know what many people are feeling about this; and, as I said at the beginning, I think that this Unstarred Question asked by the noble Lord can do nothing but help in the decisions which will have to be made. We have some idea of the strength of feeling both in your Lordships' House and outside, but we are under an obligation as a result of the Hardman Report to consider very carefully the duty that was put upon Hardman in the matter of the dispersal of Government offices.

I was asked what is in London now and what might go. I cannot say what might go, for the simple reason that we have not reached the stage of deciding what is going. But as some noble Lords will know, there is a staff dealing with callers in the Public Search Room and in Records, there is a staff which deals with telephone inquiries and another which deals with local registrars. We have top statistical experts whose job it is to investigate statistics for publication, we have the Government Social Survey staff and we have the medical statisticians. Their job is to interpret statistics for the Department of Health and Social Security and other Government Departments. We recognise that it would not be easy to shift some of those, particularly the Social Survey staffs and the medical statisticians. We are not unmindful of the difficulties, but I think we are obligated, now that we have the Report—and we have had the Report for something like a year—to make some sort of decision in the matter, and this is what we are engaged in doing at the present moment.

The noble Lord, Lord Teviot, wanted to know whom we are consulting. The Registrar General is still discussing the problems and considering the position from every possible angle. As the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, will know, there have been discussions, which are still continuing, with the Society of Genealogists; my information is that there are discussions with the Law Society; and a good deal of correspondence has been received from quite a number of eminent people who are representing other organisations, some of which the noble Lord mentioned. We have also to discuss the matter with other Government Departments which will be involved. What is perhaps very important is that we have to take into account the staff considerations and the personal problems of those members of staff who would be involved if a move of this kind took place and who are near-ing retirement. That presents quite serious staff problems.

As I have said, no decision has been made but we are grateful to have had this debate tonight, because it has enabled the noble Lord and other noble Lords to put very forcefully what they feel and what has been said will be considered when a decision is made. I do not envisage that a decision will be made hurriedly, within the next two or three weeks. There is a great deal to be considered, and consideration is being given to that at the present moment.