GRO Abandons £16 Million Effort to Digitize 171 Years of U.K. Family Records

Here is a great waste of taxpayers' funds: the General Register Office (GRO) of the United Kingdom yesterday announced that the U.K. government is abandoning a £16 Million (roughly $30 Million US Dollars) project to digitize 250 million records of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales from 1837 to the present day.

Technically, the announcement did not use the word "abandon." Instead, the announcement stated that the project has been "delayed indefinitely." However, informal conversations with government employees indicate that all employees assigned to the project are being re-assigned elsewhere and that all funding has stopped.

An attempt to scan, index and digitize 250 million records of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales from 1837 to the present day was supposed to result in a new public website that would let people trace their ancestors at the touch of a button next February. Now, three years after the government awarded the £16m contract to German computer giant Siemens, the deal has been terminated with only half the work done.

The failure drew strong criticism from genealogists who were already dismayed that last October the government removed access to paper ledgers that contained indexes of births marriages and deaths at the family records centre in London when it decided to launch the website. Te digital records were supposed to replace the paper records. Now the paper records are unavailable and the digital records project has been "delayed indefinitely."

You can read more, including reaction from a number of genealogists, in The Guardian's web site at http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/16/genealogy.records.

Comments

[Graeme Simpson]

This is really disappointing especially since the existing indexes apparently have many errors and omissions. Fortunately most of my UK ancestors came from Scotland and THEY know how to provide an excellent service to the world wide genealogical community with their online BDM records.

Also, if I were from England I would be most annoyed at the complete waste of public money for no result at all.

[Bradley Marchant]

I personally am very saddened by this announcement. I have been looking forward to having these documents online... allowing me to not only more easily trace my direct line, but all my collateral cousin lines which in turn helps other genealogists.

Scotlands People is an incredible resource for Scottish research. I was looking forward to having another similar resource for my British roots.

If there was an address for me to write to in England to appeal this decision, I'd gladly send a petition...

[martin morley]

I am from England, and am equally appalled by this news. However there is a way forward - BUT

"If there was an address for me to write to in England to appeal this decision, I'd gladly send a petition..."

"The e-Petitions service will be closed to new submissions during the Prime Minster's time away from Number 10.

This temporary closure will allow the Digital Communications team to deal more effectively with the large number of submissions that have built up due to the huge popularity of the service.

The e-Petitions system will re-open to new submissions when the Prime Minister returns to Downing Street after his summer break around 1 September."

Perhaps we can start one then?

[Roger]

I am British and regrettably it is all too common for government-funded computer projects in this country to end in failure, usually resulting in massive amounts of money being wasted in a job half-done or else in a system that doesn't work.

Of course, all is not lost because paper copies of certificates can still be ordered and arrive by post around a week later. But the digitisation would have improved the methods for searching for ancestors and would have made the delivery of certificates instantaneous (but not free!).

[Jeff Piper]

I wonder how much is wasted. We award a contract and then terminate it. Will we have to pay the whole of the contract or just for what was done? Will what has been done become available?
Perhaps Siemens will see it as a future source of income and request to continue at their expense.

[Faye Guthrie]

Sixteen million!! The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would have done it for nothing.

[LindaS]

Ah, there's no explanation in the article as to why it failed. Anyone have any other information? Did they just run out of money? What was the difficulty? Strange that the reporter didn't convey this info....?

[Bill McGrath]

After reading Senator Lorna Milne's experiences with the Canadian government about releasing census returns - It would be interesting to read a paper on how this boondoggle came about in England. Was it caused by bureaucrats, the so-called civil servants, who really "run" things or simply trying to mix oil and water ie: government and private enterprise.

[Cathie]

I to am very happy to have the Scotlandpeople site available to me, being a natural born Scot. Yes I do pay for it, worth every penny.

Also I have just cancelled a years subscription to Ancestry.co.uk, since they do not have BMD for Scotland and only indexes for the census of Scotland. They do have a lot of records for England and Wales. When I signed up for this I did not realize their records were so lacking for Scotland. Some other genealogy sites also who advertise UK, do not have anything for Scotland.

Cathie Christie

[Sue]

Excerpt from the article in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/16/genealogy.records.

"Unions demanded an inquiry by the National Audit Office into the collapse of the deal. "Despite repeated warnings, the government dogmatically ploughed on and outsourced this important and sensitive work to the private sector," said Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union. "Yet again a private sector company has pocketed millions of pounds of taxpayer's money for an incomplete job."

The decision to digitise the system was highly controversial at the time. Siemens outsourced much of the work to India, which led to protests from civil service unions that data security was being put at risk and the contract would be too complicated to deliver on time.

Len Cook, then the registrar general, defended the move claiming the reform was part of delivering " a better, more efficient service to the public and part of the government's agenda of "offering choice and joined up services to the public".

My comments:
I certainly hope there is an inquiry. It would be nice to know what Siemens had to do with all this. Was there a competitive bid?
Are there UK Auditors on the job?

Many people rush to "blame" the government but surely you genealogists remember that if there were no government there would be no records for you to research.

Can you admit once and for all that when we critize the government in an unconstructive way we're shooting ourselves in the foot.

We need to make the government accountable. We citizens are the government.

[Timothy Eastman]

Government idiotic logic - go with the lowest bidder no matter the quality. If top businesses did that they'd lose their customers. Too many unqualified, under-educated people in charge of government affairs.
Perhaps the government can ask citizens to volunteer to come to their records office to digitize the rest of the records or make a deal with the LDS Church to do it all right in the first place.
When digitizing records originally in English, you NEED digitizers who's primary language is English - not German and NOT Hindi. That is why Ancestry's indexes are so messed up; out-sourcing to people who don't fluently know the language.

[David Lowndes]

Cathie Christie:

I too make great use of Scotlandspeople, but please realize that the reason Ancestry has so few Scottish records is that the Scottish government and their private partner operating Scotlandspeople will not give them access to them. SP is a very lucrative source of revenue for them, and they have no wish to share it with Ancestry.

[Arvina Copeland]

Energy needs to be directed toward a solution now without abandoning the goal. Make public the problem, cause of the problem, and possible fixes for the problem. Someone in the public sector (not on the payroll) might have the ability to see clearer the way to a solution.

[Bradley D. Marchant]

I would think it would be smart for the British government to put the half-digitized project online just to test it out. If they don't make their money back in a short amount of time, I'd be shocked...

Honestly, I believe if they charged less money per certificate and had them online (a la Scotlands People) they'd make all their money back in a relatively short amount of time. I personally know dozens who had planned on purchasing many certificates online, including myself.