Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what arrangements her Department has provided following implementation of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 to enable local registration services to register births, stillbirths and deaths in circumstances where the national electronic registration system is unavailable.

An electronic record has been in place alongside paper registers since 2009. From 9 November 2026, that electronic register will replace paper registers as the sole vehicle for the registration of births, deaths and stillbirths The electronic register is subject to robust controls, with well-established measures in place to ensure that registrations continue to be completed within the statutory timeframe.

In the event of a national system outage affecting the electronic register, the General Register Office would manage the situation as it does now through its critical or major incident arrangements, with the response determined by the nature and impact of the incident.