A short history of registration
Accessing records
The Labour Government set up a project in 2005 to digitise all birth, death and marriage certificates and set up a national online database similar to Scotland's People. The work was planned to take three years. By the time the contract period had ended in 2008 Siemens IT Solutions & Services, to whom the work was outsourced, had only managed to process half the records. The contract was not renewed, but a new project was set up to complete the work. Unfortunately that was suspended in 2010 as part of the Conservative Government's austerity measures.
About 130 million records have been digitised, comprising birth records to 1934 and death records to 1957. In fact, when you apply for a copy birth or death certificate, it is from this database that the General Register Office provides the document. Unfortunately there is no public access to the database.
