By Andy McCue, 23 June 2005 14:15
NEWS The Office of National Statistics (ONS) is to outsource a new database containing 250 million births, marriages and deaths records to India as part of a deal with Siemens Business Services (SBS).
The database will be created by digitising paper records and centralising existing disparate indexes and systems for the UK population dating back to 1837.
The ONS is currently in final contract negotiations after choosing SBS as preferred bidder for the work and expects to sign a deal by mid-July. It said the value of the contract is "commercially confidential".
The UK Passport Service also plans to link up to the database for cross-reference checking of passport applications to help cut down on the submission of forged or fraudulent documents.
Much of the records work is currently done in Southport but under SBS the records will be transferred electronically via an encrypted virtual private network link to be indexed by workers at a facility in Chennai (formerly Madras) in India.
A spokeswoman from the ONS said putting the records online will aid genealogists tracing family histories. She dismissed claims from public sector union PCS that the move will put sensitive information at risk.
"These are public documents that are already in the public domain. People have no need to be worried," she told silicon.com.
Comments
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1. David Marder
This is misleading. Births, deaths and marriage records are not going to India. They will always remain in Britain. What's happening in India is that an Indian branch of Siemens will do the data-capture in a number of chunks of scanned material. It all then comes back to Britain and nothing is held overseas.
David Marder
2. anonymous
The cost of every government project seems to be "commercially sensitive" nowadays. I can understand it when they are selecting a provider, but surely once the deal is done we should know how much of our money is being spent?
3. anonymous too
Would this be the same Siemens who run the outsourced MOT service, the one that is 3 years behind schedule? Seems to me wherever they put it, it'll end up as another fiasco.
4. ID Thief
they might be in the public domain, but they're hard to collate when you want to do a spot of ID theft. this'll make it much easier, probably be able to pick up a few thousand full sets at 3 quid a pop from a Sun reporter too.
pay dirt ;-)
5. anonymous
Dear God! the lunatics are truly running the asylum. this item comes at the same time as the theft of bank details in the same country. may as well give them everything else while we're at it. how about the house of commons is outsourced there too?
6. Dan Teegarter (Don Tregartha)
Forget ID theft, what about ID loss?
On a government project like this I can see the possibility for endless errors and ommisions which will come back to haunt us all.
7. anonymous
Great
Is there anything else we need to make sure they have, to complete the ID theft? Let me see, they have our bank details, now our birth and marriage certificate details, and links to the passport service. Have we forgotten anything?
8. Nic
Nice one - good to see the UK gov supporting UK jobs!
9. Tony Sutton
Made me laugh...
..."These are public documents that are already in the public domain. People have no need to be worried,"...
but earlier on in the same article...
..."the records will be transferred electronically via an encrypted virtual private network link"...
Why do they need to send it encrypted if they say the records are public domain anyway?
10. James
Take a step back and realise that your planes would not fly, your banks would not be able to offer the services they do - and your share options worth nothing if companies did not outsource. NOTHING you buy - and NO service you have can affordably be done in UK and USA, we have all got to fat and expect to much for doing to little. Face it - we want and need to Outsource. India is not the only country, maybe they will lose thier grip and a lot of business, but they still offer a great service to thousands of companies. The other top countries in the World are China, Romania, Czech, Singapore, Poland, Hong Kong, Canada, Hungary, The Carribean, Phillipines, Malaysia, Thailand, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Sri Lanka, Chile - so get used to it, they need good security, but it aint going away - not now, not ever.
11. Mike
The concept of an electronic Register is good. Hopefully they will get round to linking deaths to births, so an ID theft can't get a passport in the name of a dead person. (It could have been done without a computer!)
The other thing that would help is to add National Insurance numbers and to issue these at birth in future.
When the NI system was set up in 1947?, It was decided not to issue NI numbers at birth due to high infant mortality. However, they soon found they needed a national health number to cover the gap up to the age of (then)14, so we have two numbers doing one job! (a Whitehall penpushers dream - unnecessary bureacracy!)
12. Antony Norris
James, the problem is once we have outsourced everything, we'll have nothing to do, then once the UK is poor enough India will start outsourcing to us, in the meantime large corporations get even richer... ...come the revolution!!
There is one more thing we'll outsource to India of course, National ID cards :)
13. James Button
Get your hand crafted BIO ID card direct from India, That'll knock £90 off the government price.
14. anonymous
So why are they sending them encrypted to India?
15. Hugh Bracey
What an excellent opprtunity for the "entrepreneurs" in the call centre .
I can see lots of new births marriages etc being slipped into the records to enable potential immigrants to arrive in UK legally.
This will probably cost more than £4.25 per record but will still be cheaper and more efficient that paying thousands to be smuggled in with the chance of being caught!!!
16. Eric
With regard to the comments about the cost of this project being commercially sensitive- If the cost is known, then the free press (the ones not in New Labour's pocket) could have a field day when the system fails/costs run away, not of which will be anyone's fault.
When he first came to power Blair promised a more transparent government, which in NL speak means we'll do what we want and you can shut up.
Being up front and open about IT projects would enable their ideas to be assessed and NL can't cope with being told they are fools.
17. Oliver Lewis
The Birth, Marriage and Death Indexes are available at the Family Record Centre. Anyone can order the Certificates from www.gro.gov.uk so why the encryption? Well its all a bit of puff. The cost is thought to be a minimum of £20 £25 million. Funny thing is that most of this information is already available from www.familyrelatives.org, www.bmdindex.co.uk and www.1837online.com. So what is all the fuss about. Privacy is no longer available e.g. electoral register. Maybe its just another waste of another £25 million. Perhaps they can use it for sorting out the benefits fiasco.
18. Nick Cole
A charter for ID theft!
What real purpose is to be solved by passing on this ultimate source of all our highly personal ID records and other data to a foreign country?
This is penny-pinching gone mad. And what happens if by some chance the systems go down and become inaccessible from UK? Are we to grind to a halt? Or is the civil service going to go back to quill pens and ledgers as a manual backup?
Why doesn't the government (who we support with our taxes) do anything to support our own infrastructure and technical population?
All this just to run a few servers and hard disks!
19. anonymous
Data Protection Act? Ha Ha
20. Tony Foster
Incomplete and Inaccurate Records (UK or England & Wales)
It is well known that the central records of births, marriages and deaths consist of copies rather than the original entries and there was no provision in the legislation for checking the accuracy of the copies. There was great doubt whether much of any checking that was done was effective. The Registration Service is fully aware of errors with the GRO records. The Deputy Registrar General of England and Wales referring to the research undertaken by Michael Foster stated in 1998 “The incompleteness and inaccuracies of the GRO indexes, has been known but Michael’s research and the results contained in this book provide evidence of the extent of the problem.” (see Michael Whitfield Foster, “A Comedy of Errors” or The Marriage Records of England and Wales 1837-1899. [Wellington, 1998].
Mike on pages 174-5 states:
“The findings of this research are based on the partial checking at the General Register Office of a one per cent sample of the marriage material. It can only be expected that the untouched ninety nine per cent and more, not to mention the birth and death records, will conceal much more of the same and undoubtedly some that is much worse. Here are very round figures based on finding for different parts of the research.
Omitted quarterly returns could well be between 50,000 and 350,000 marriages based on finding from Essex and Somerset analysis.
Marriages missed in the indexing could be at least 15,000
Individual entries missing from the index could be around 20,000
Variant/duplicate indexing could amount to 250,000 to 500,000 names.
Errors in names as indexed are many and could rival the variant names.
Names lost from the indexes through the typing process are certainly significant and impossible to quantify at this stage.
Names lost from least the handwritten fiche and film of all three indexes are of the order of 25,000 through frames missed in their production.
Errors of indexing (in volume/page numbers and district names), both in original indexing and through later typing, could range from 50,000 to 200,000.
There are many other errors in great variety, witnesses indexed, fathers indexed instead of sons, brides indexed with new names.
These estimates of errors may well be conservative. A million errors in the 1837/99 period are very probable.”
Mike makes a number of recommendations including a complete overhaul of the 1800’s records to overcome most of these deficiencies and to produce a new record system and a computer-searchable index system at both local and national level. The Deupty Registrar General of England and Wales does appreciate that some of Mike’s recommendations are not implementable because of resource implications but she does acknowledge the need to take into account the quality of the indexes when considering a computerised solution to access to records (page viii).
Even if the centrally held copied records are digitised and re-indexed there will still be numerous errors when compared to the original records that are held by the local offices. Even if the new central computerised is errors free we will still not have overcome the problem with the differences between local and central records. With the difference between central and local records would it not be possible for the local records to digitise rather than those held centrally? (see the work of the UKBMD project).
If the Registration Service is intending to re-index the centrally held records is it the intention to include the mother’s maiden name for all births and ages for all deaths?
The subject heading refers to UK records but as Southport only holds the records of England and Wales it would be useful to know if rather it is all of the United Kingdom’s birth, marriage and deaths records or does it just refer to England and Wales?
21. Ian Hartas
See UKBMD.org.uk
There are already two volunteer projects underway to put the BMD indexes on-line. FreeBMD is working off the GRO's secondary indexes, and UKBMD is working from the original records held by the registrars. The government should be making use of the volunteers from family history societies to transcribe the original records, rather than wasting public money on copying secondary records again !
22. Tony Sygrove
This is an utter nonsense, especially after the bank details farce. It is about time that the british citizens fought back against a dictatorial government who will not be content until they have sold us all down the river and we ourselves become a third world country.
23. anonymous
Great Britain!? What's so great about it? We all get hammered by Government & Banks because we all want to live a better life. So what do these ruling organisations do? give foreigners our details, our lives, and for what?! To cut a few costs to their bills. Does this mean that by 2010 we'll all be Indian Nationals?!
The one thing that gets me though, is that people are honestly surprised by all this! Couldn't anyone see it coming? You vote in Blair and his bunch of 'Used Car Salesmen' and wonder why the country is continuing down the drain. Personally, I'm finding out if my Bank was included in that list, and if so, I'm moving accounts! As for the government, make sure you don't vote in criminals next time, don't be sheep, think for yourselves!!
24. Deboragh Lewis
Not only is the BMD Index already available but it is also not as complete as we might like to think. Out sourcing the work will only make things worse, if you want to check that try looking at the transcriptions of censuses easily available 1861 - 1881 and 1901 the many mistakes, spelling errors and missing people is enormous and that's what happens when information is copied then re-copied and copied again.