Clause 66
Statistics and Registration Service Bill
2:00 pm
Brian Iddon (Bolton South East, Labour)
It is strange how one gets involved in business in this place. In the mid-1990s, I was a director of the city challenge in Bolton and we were looking around for flagship schemes. I proposed to the then leader of the council, Bob Howarth, that we should bring back into use an old hall on a hill overlooking Bolton that was in a rather attractive park. The hall had been boarded up for several years. It had previously been a mill owner’s house. I proposed that we move the registration service in Bolton out of dreadful premises in the town centre—where the brides came out into patches of oil on a taxi rank—to that lovely old hall set in a beautiful park. That cost £1 million, but it was achieved.
The registration service there today supports a community centre, a hospitality suite with bars, and so on. I was pleased to hear that it celebrated its 10th anniversary last week and that Oliver Barton, who was the principal officer at the time, returned and helped them celebrate. I was pleased in one way, but not so pleased in another, when my eldest daughter, Sally, chose to get married in Mere hall—the lovely old hall that I am talking about—right in the middle of the election campaign, which brought me to the House in 1997.
When Joyce Quin, the former hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West was promoted to the other place as Baroness Quin, the Society of Registration Officers was casting around for a new patron for England and Wales. It was no surprise, therefore, when my name popped up. I was initially pleased to be invited, because I thought that it was a great honour, but it soon dawned on me that the society was giving me a huge responsibility, because it was seeking to achieve what the Bill will, hopefully, bring about. It has taken 10 years of campaigning. I have lost count of how many Ministers I have met, both at the Department of Trade and Industry and the Treasury, with officers of the Society of Registration Officers and, latterly, Unison to try to bring about this measure.
It is odd that registration officers are appointed, housed and paid by local authorities and that their pensions are arranged by local authorities, but only one person—the Registrar General in Pimlico, London—has the right to dismiss them. When I began this campaign there was no right of appeal against dismissal. At least in the early days of the campaign we won the right of appeal, but appeals had to be heard by the Registrar General in Pimlico and he could hear them only on the basis of new evidence.
During my time as the society’s patron at least 18 members of the service have been dismissed—some of them under bitter circumstances that I do not want to relate.