§ Second Reading debate continued.
§ 3.55 p.m.
§ Lord LYELLMy Lords, perhaps we may return to the more esoteric demands of the Bill which has been moved so ably and at very short notice by my noble friend Lord Teviot. I am sure that the whole House will be very grateful to my noble friend for introducing his Bill. Indeed, many people outside the House will already appreciate what the Bill will do for them and, indeed, for the quality of their researches.
Normally, the term "Public Records" can strike fear into the hearts of many of us, in that we imagine ourselves to be lost in some huge, dungeon-like storeroom amid a sea of dusty documents which are probably kept in a massive safe or even in one of those containers which so much resemble a giant biscuit tin. The list of speakers for today's debate brings me back to normality because whenever we find the name of the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor down to speak there is a very fair chance that he will also find my name on the list. Today, I am once again in the position of some small, beavering animal—perhaps a ferret—scurrying amid the giants of the ordered and measured society that makes up your Lordships' House. Certainly, included among those giants I had in mind the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor and the noble and learned Lord the Master of the Rolls. I believe 1101 that other measures may have precluded the attendance of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Denning, at this stage of the debate, but I hope that we shall be able to hear from him later.
My noble friend Lord Teviot and I are among the users of the public records contained in the exclusion clause to Schedule I to the 1958 Act in one very special sense—namely, that both of us have had to prove that we are, indeed, the heirs to our fathers and thus are able to claim our small roles in the affairs of the House. I know that I am speaking from a legally privileged position, both from this Box, and, indeed, from within the Chamber. Neither the noble and learned Lord who sits upon the Woolsack nor the noble and learned Lord the Master of the Rolls, who was to speak, have yet been required to produce their birth certificates before being able to speak in your Lordships' House. I hope that that is no reflection on them; indeed, I hope it will not cause either of them to regard themselves as being different from my noble friend Lord Teviot and myself as hereditary Peers or to utter writs in my direction.
However, as we have heard from my noble friend, the Bill aims to assist many users of the public records in their researches. I know that he has taken great care to see that the Bill is clear in its intentions, its content and, above all, its drafting. This last aspect will, I know, be especially dear to the heart of the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor and, indeed, to all lawyers in your Lordships' House. The Bill appears very simple to me; indeed, that is no small triumph. I hope and believe that it will help researchers and historians from all over the English-speaking world.
These researchers are at present under a slight difficulty in that, as we heard from my noble friend, they have to pay £2.50 for a certificate of birth, marriage or death. Often the correct information is not obtained because of the handwriting of a clergyman in Victorian times or perhaps because of the condition of the parchment. There is also the problem of time and energy spent in searching out one of dozens of similar names. However, the Bill will mean that the searches will be far more easily completed by the expert genealogists and others such as librarians. I hope that this process will allow the 1102 expert assistants at the Public Records Office to give help to those who require it while allowing the proper researchers reasonable and uncomplicated access to such records as they wish to examine.
Some research bodies have expressed to me their contentment that the Registrar General has been able to allow the first 41 years of records concerning births, marriages and deaths to be placed on unrestricted view. I believe that this is a major achievement because prior to 1866 these records were kept on massive parchment sheets which, certainly from such experience as I have had in these matters, require considerable perusal in order to obtain any information at all, let alone the information that one is looking for. The gathering of this information will now be greatly helped and I think that everyone will be grateful.
As he pointed out, my noble friend Lord Teviot is a considerable user of these records. Your Lordships will be aware of his passion and expertise, and of his great interest in public records and their avail-ability to all, especially those who can, and I believe will, benefit most. All these researchers, genealogists and, indeed, the perplexed members of the public such as myself are grateful to my noble friend for introducing this Bill. As always, we await a witty and valuable contribution to explaining the Bill, and indeed public records, from the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, who is to follow. From these Benches we welcome this Bill, and we hope that it will have a speedy passage through your Lordships' House.
§ 4.1 p.m.
Viscount BARRINGTONMy Lords, in the absence of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Denning, and as the timetable has gone slightly awry, may I personally welcome this Bill. I think it might have affected me at the time when I took a seat in your Lordships' House. I had to prove, first of all, that I had been born! I was able to do that. There was a birth certificate. I then had to prove that my father, who was a second son, had also been born. There were unfortunately two records as to when he had been born. His mother said that he had been born on one day and his elder sister, who was more reliable, said that he had been born on another day.
1103 I had considerable difficulty—but received great help from the Clerks of the House at the time—not only in giving my name (being an Irish Peer I had to say, with some shame, what was my name: I had to say, "Patrick Shute") but I also had some difficulty in producing evidence that my father had ever been born. I visualised myself going around on a bicycle in the place where I knew that he had been born trying to get a baptismal certificate. Thanks to the help of the Clerks I was allowed to enter this House. I do not know whether this Bill will make it easier for people in that position in the future. I believe it will; but may I personally give my blessing to any Bill which makes it easier for people to establish their heredity without too much trouble to the authorities.
§ 4.3 p.m.
§ The LORD CHANCELLORMy Lords, may I begin by apologising to the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, for my absence during the first two minutes of his speech due to circumstances over which I had no control. I shall speak to the noble Lord who is responsible for the omission in due course—in the most friendly way possible, of course. The noble Lord, Lord Teviot, to whom I and the House are grateful for producing and explaining this Bill, has told us how the exploration of our past and the lives of our forbears has become a matter of increasing interest and concern. I think it is not a bad thing not to forget our roots, if I may say so.
It is very interesting how the sense of historical and genealogical interest has grown so greatly in recent years—indeed, even in the period since about 1975. The noble Lord, Lord Teviot, is of course a distinguished expert in this field. I myself, as the Minister with overall responsibility for public records, welcome the initiative that the noble Lord and his colleagues on the Advisory Council have shown in preparing the Bill. A short reading of it shows that to convert the registers of births, marriages and deaths into public records, which is what the Bill does, is not a simple matter. I shall say a word or two about the Bill in a moment.
The proposals in the Bill have been discussed in recent years by the General Register Office, the Public Record Office and my Department. During the last 1104 12 months the Advisory Council has also given the matter very careful thought. It is unfortunate that, owing to the change in the business of the House, we shall miss the presence of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls. I am sure that he would have been very interesting on these matters.
The discussions that have taken place have enabled a great deal of progress to be made in working out the administrative and legal details which would be necessary before legislation could be prepared and, if I may say so, made effective. It was agreed from the beginning that before the transfer of these registers of births, marriages and deaths could be contemplated they would have to be microfilmed. This is now taking place (it is a big task), and I understand that the work is being pressed on, although it is unlikely to be completed before the end of 1980. It is towards that sort of timetable that the Departments have been working.
It seems to me that there are two main issues arising in our debate. We have to consider, first, whether the Bill is right in principle and, secondly, whether the proposals are practicable to be given effect to now in a Bill. On the matter of principle, the effect of the Bill will be to give the public free access to all the births, marriages and deaths registers in England and Wales which are over 100 years old. At the moment, the individual citizen seeking information is entitled to see the individual certificate but has no access to the register itself. The effect of the proposed change would be to give access to the register proper. As to the principle of the transfer, the General Register Office and the Public Record Office have broadly reached agreement, but that is subject to ministerial approval.
The concept behind what is proposed, as I understand it, is that a point is reached in the life of the registers when the main justification for their continued retention is no longer that they meet administrative needs, or furnish legal evidence of births, marriages and deaths, but simply that they provide interesting and useful information for genealogical, historical and other research. It is argued—as indeed the noble Lord has done—with considerable force that the proper place for records whose age endows them with these qualities is the 1105 Public Record Office, although if that is accepted it must also be accepted that the result will be that the registers of births, marriages and deaths will be split into two categories, the General Register Office being responsible for what one might call the "young" registers of births, marriages and deaths of less than 100 years old, and the Public Record Office for the "centenarians". The merits of the principle to which I referred may outweigh the possible disadvantages which may come from splitting the registers in this way.
The second issue is whether these proposals are practicable and can be given effect to now so that it would be appropriate now to legislate for the proposals. There are plainly considerable administrative and financial implications in what is proposed. I have little doubt, as indeed the noble Lord indicated, that the administrative problems can be resolved; for instance, microfilming will overcome the difficulty of making the information in these bulky registers available. I should also mention that the Keeper of Public Records considers that the problem of housing and giving access to these registers of births, marriages and deaths must be treated as part of a rather wider problem, which includes the ultimate destination of the census records (at present, as the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, knows, located in very cramped conditions in Portugal Street), and there is need for ultimate provision for the probate registers. Both the census registers and the probate registers are already public records, so no legislation will be needed in respect of those.
I have suggested that the administrative difficulties could be resolved and I am confident that satisfactory plans could be completed before the time arrived, at the end of 1980, when the proposed transfer could take place. Unhappily, however, the financial implications cannot so easily be resolved and I am afraid that this Government, at a time of continuing demand to restrain public expenditure, cannot lend their support to legislation which they cannot afford to implement. What we are doing—and I believe this to be a crucial preliminary to further progress in this matter—is to assess the present and future scale of the problem on the assumption that all the registers which 1106 are over 100 years old would be transferred to the Public Record Office at the beginning of 1981, and that subsequent transfers would take place at appropriate intervals when the registers reach the venerable age required.
It is not merely a matter of the number of registers. As the noble Lord said, the interest in genealogy has greatly increased, and I believe this trend will continue. The space required would be considerable: I am told that, on a reasonable estimate, the proposed transfer might result in an additional attendance of about 150 readers a day at the Public Record Office in Kew. This, of course, does not take account of a the existing numbers who are crammed into the census room in Portugal Street.
The House will appreciate that to supply the accommodation, the micro-film reading machines, the staff and all the other resources needed to meet the public demand would be no easy or inexpensive matter. Noble Lords will know that personal attendance and access to records by readers at the Public Record Office is free, and we all greatly hope that that can be maintained, but I do not think it is quite so simple as the noble Lord suggested—that is, that there would merely be a transfer of costs from one Department to another. I am advised that the Bill would involve an additional burden on public funds. Those funds are, I am afraid, not yet authorised and indeed cannot be authorised because they cannot yet be quantified.
This is always a dreary thing for a Minister to have to say. In my time in public life I have so often known a halt being cried to what one would like to do immediately because of the exigencies of finding the money. However, that presents a real difficulty and I do not think delaying the entry into force of the Bill until an appointed day would resolve the matter. I have been chastised more than once by my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner for introducing Bills with an appointed day provision when years and years elapse before effect is given to the provisions of the Bill. As a legislative body, we should resist the temptation of putting something on the Statute Book as a sort of moral duty upon Government when it may take a very long time indeed to give 1107 effect to it. However, as the noble Lord may have gathered, my sympathy for what he has in mind is very great.
As for the Bill itself, I am not happy about the Short Title; it tells very little—I say this with due acknowledgment to the eminence of learned counsel who drafted it—and perhaps a more precise Title might be "The Births, Marriages and Deaths Registers (Public Access) Bill", or something on those lines, because that is the heart of it, though I would not pretend that that is an important difficulty. Something of that kind would be needed if it were found, on further examination of the matter, that there was no need to confer the status of public records on these registers. It might, for instance, be sufficient if the Bill were to authorise transfer of the registers to the Keeper of Public Records and require the Keeper to provide access. That might be an alternative method of dealing with it which, at later stages of the Bill, we might consider.
I must, secondly, raise a reservation about Clause l(b), which would enable the 100-year period to be reduced. I was glad to hear Lord Teviot agree that the 100-year rule should be maintained, because I believe a firm decision now on the appropriate period would be better than having the period altered from time to time hereafter. All I can say is that I cannot give full support to the Bill at the present time—I think it is premature—but I can assure the House that the Public Record Office will continue its task of assessing both the administrative and financial consequences of the proposals for transfer and easing the matter as much as possible. I hope, therefore, that the effect of a delay in introducing a Bill which could receive full Government support will not in practice mean delaying for very long what the noble Lord seeks to achieve.
I noted the, as always, helpful contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Lyell, whose expertise in these esoteric matters has always been a source of admiration. His contributions are always most useful I am sure we were also interested in the experiences of the noble Viscount, Lord Barrington: I hope he was able in due course to satisfy himself about his own ancestry and that of all others related to him.
§ 4.18 p.m.
§ Lord TEVIOTMy Lords, I wish at the outset to thank all those who have spoken. I have received apologies from the noble Lord, Lord Lloyd of Kilgerran, for not being in his place for the preceding debate; that meant this Bill coming on rather prematurely, and therefore I am taking the unprecedented step of apologising to my family and friends whom I invited to be here shortly after 4.30. Fortunately, however, I see that some of them are here.
Is the Lord Chancellor asking me to withdraw the Bill this afternoon? No indication of that was given to me until the noble and learned Lord's speech. If that is the position, I hope that in due course he will interrupt and indicate that that is his wish, because he gave the Bill his blessing to start with and then brought out the two main issues, the Bill being all right in principle and then the practical issues. There did not seem to be anything between us on the principles. However, when he dealt with the practical issues, he asked why I had introduced the Bill now. The answer is that while these microfilm records will not be available until 1980, noble Lords know that while it is reasonably straightforward to get a Bill through all its stages in this House, it is not straightforward to get it through the other place, for a variety of reasons of which the noble and learned Lord will be well aware. For that reason I consider that the Bill is not premature. It merely seeks to remove legal difficulty.
The noble and learned Lord also brought out the point that the records could be accepted under Section 2(2) of the Public Records Act. One has been into that matter fully, and I think it has been accepted by the noble and learned Lord's Department and the Public Record Office, but the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys has always argued very strongly that it is not so. That is why one has gone to extreme trouble and taken time to produce the Bill, and to remove by means of Clause 2 of the Bill the consequential provisions of the earlier legislation.
I turn to the financial implications of the Bill. I referred earlier to the transfer of costs from one Department to another. The Front Bench speaker for the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys is not in his seat, and I do not expect him to be 1109 so because he was not briefed. Nevertheless, I should like to mention one or two things about that Department of which I have intimate knowledge. I believe that the transfer would result in considerable savings, bearing in mind the higher accommodation costs of the records at the old Somerset House, and at Bush House and St. Catherine's House. There must also be considered the number of staff who deal with the older records. I have in mind not only those staff in the public section, but also those who deal with postal inquiries. Therefore, I feel that there must be considerable savings by what is proposed.
I should like to go ahead with the Bill if the noble and learned Lord has no objection. There will be an opportunity to amend the Bill in Committee. With regard to the question of the Short Title, when the Bill was proposed to me the Title suggested to me was Births, Marriages and Deaths (Transfer of Records) Bill, but learned counsel who drafted the Bill said that the Title should be Public Records Amendment Bill, so I accepted that. However, if it is possible to amend the Short Title in Committee I should be only too happy for that to be done.
I should like to see a future for the Bill. I feel that it deserves a place. If we wait until 1980 for the microfilms to be completed, there might be a change of Government, or other changed circumstances. This is the perfect year for such a Bill—the fifth year of a Government. We should be able to get such proposals through, or at any rate debated—
§ The LORD CHANCELLORMy Lords, the noble Lord asked whether I was inviting him to withdraw the Bill. I do not make that request to him. I have said that we believe that it would be convenient if the Bill were not introduced and sought to be taken through its various stages in this House and another place at this time because there is so much work still to be done. However, if, despite that discouragement, the noble Lord wishes to take pot luck—if that is the right way to put it—I certainly would not stand in his way.
§ Lord TEVIOTMy Lords, upon that assurance from the noble and learned Lord I propose to go ahead with the Bill and to take pot luck. I have an excellent 1110 Member of the House of Commons who would like to take charge of it over there, and I think that many people would be disappointed if the Bill did not go forward.
§ On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.