Transparency documents outline plans for government and citizens – who typically travel 50 miles to register a death – to complete processes digitally, but project relies on new government to update laws
The Home Office has launched a major multi-year programme to drive digital transformation of the processes by which citizens register major life events.
Through the General Register Office agency – which sits within HM Passport Office – the Home Office collates and stores registration details for a collective total of about 1.5 million births, stillbirths, adoptions, deaths, marriages, and civil partnerships across England and Wales each year.
The department has kicked off a major project, dubbed the Civil Registration Service Transformation Programme, intended to reform processes and deliver significant digitisation, while reducing paper usage and updating technological infrastructure. The initiative will also provide an “environmental benefit of reduced carbon emissions, [as] a small sample study demonstrated customers travel on average 50 miles to register a death”, according to newly published project documents.
If delivered successfully, the project will enable citizens to complete a comprehensive range of formal registration processes – and access current and historical records – online. Work is also intended to create new digital services enabling government to share data across departments, and potentially with private-sector partners.
However, after a key piece of legislation put forward by the previous government failed to pass before the election, some of the programme’s plans will require the Labour administration to create new laws enabling citizens to remotely register births, deaths and other life events.
In a letter kick starting the project with the formal appointment of a senior responsible owner – the Home Office’s deputy director of civil registrations and citizenship, Carly Blay – the department sets out five main sub-projects that will comprise the overall programme of work.
Delivering this quintet of initiatives will enable the Home Office to meet its objective to “transform and replace the core civil registration systems in England and Wales and to scan and transcribe the remaining microfilm records” – which the department describes as “ageing equipment which is currently being used to store over 130 million registration copies”.
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The first of the five core strands of the programme is the delivery of a new “Digital Registration Service” that provides citizens with a “life events registration process that supports a multi-channel approach, enabling citizens the choice of online, telephone and face-to-face registrations, where allowed under current and future legislation”.
The second major objective is to improve the management of data by creating “a new centralised data store for all life event information that enables effective data sharing, replacing multiple legacy storage systems and hardcopy. This work “also includes building capability to effectively manage and amend records”, according to the letter.
This project is complemented by the third strand of work which will be dedicated to enabling the Home Office to “create modern services to share life event data with other government departments that rely on it to deliver key public services”. These services could also include mechanisms to share information with private-sector entities. Citizens, meanwhile, will be provided with “a new ordering and fulfilment platform for citizens to access and purchase records”.
The penultimate sub-project focuses on deploying technology for “scanning and transcription… of GRO records to ensure all records are digitised and easily accessible”, and populated with accurate information, even where data is derived from paper or static images.
The final element of the transformation agenda is intended to deliver an “online view” platform “that enables users to view historic records online and [provides] the ability to purchase copies of certificates or PDFs if they require”.
The letter advises the new SRO that some of the outcomes the programme is intended to deliver have “an external dependency on legislative change that is currently paused without a means to progress, and the subsequent delay will impact on the delivery plan and therefore the benefits case”.
Emergency laws passed during the coronavirus crisis enabled deaths to be registered by citizens remotely, and for local authorities to submit registrations documents to government electronically. Having reviewed the impact of this legislation, the previous government concluded that it delivered significant benefits for citizens and public bodies, and intended to update the UK’s legal framework to enable far greater use of digital civil registrations on a permanent basis.
However, the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill – which contained the new measures – did not pass into law before the general election.
For the Home Office’s planned transformation to be delivered in full, the new Labour administration will seemingly be required to table primary legislation providing an updated legal framework for civil registrations.
Because the scheme has been added to the Government Major Projects Portfolio since the last full set of annual data, details of the expected costs of delivering the programme to conclusion are not yet available. But the SRO appointment letter reveals that work is expected to continue until the beginning of the 2030s.
“The vision of the Civil Registration Service Transformation Programme delivers [a] plan for the transformation and replacement of core civil registration systems and infrastructure to transcribe birth, deaths and marriages. This aligns with the Home Office vision and the government’s wider digital identity ambitions,” the letter adds. “This will result in a more modern, efficient and resilient civil registration service for England and Wales.”
