Highland Registrars continue to rise to the COVID-19 challenge and are maintaining quality services

Registrars in Highland have been praised by the Chair of Highland Council's Communities and Place Committee Cllr Allan Henderson, for achieving a positive external assessment from the National Registrars of Scotland (NRS) with over 97% accuracy in their records for 2019.

The 2020 examination of records is underway. He also thanked them for responding so well to dealing with the backlog of birth registrations caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and in dealing with death registrations so sensitively during such a difficult time for bereaved families.

Approximately 140,000 life events are registered in Scotland each year and Highland Council has the seventh highest number of events registered of 32 Councils in Scotland, with around 6,000 registrations normally recorded.

However, COVID-19 clearly had a huge impact on the estimated figures for 2020, with marriages and births reduced, although the data for 2020 is still to be fully ratified by National Records of Scotland (NRS).

Early assessment of figures put the number of registrations in Highland at 5,369 which represents a considerable fall when compared to pre-COVID years. In 2019 there were 6,196 and in 2018 there were 6,365 registrations.

With birth registration initially suspended following the first lockdown the service built up a backlog of around 400 birth registrations, however, by September 2020 the teams had cleared this backlog completely.

Staff were also worried that they would not be able to offer the same service to bereaved families as NRS required registration to be carried out remotely and not face to face, but the real feedback has been very positive.

People are now able to register a death from the comfort of their own home perhaps supported by loved ones, or from anywhere in the country or abroad using telephony and email where appropriate. Despite the changes to working practices staff adapted extremely well and continued to provide a service to their communities.

Many couples hoping to marry have had to change their plans over the past year, with marriages initially suspended and then permitted with restrictions on the numbers attending and venues to use.  Preliminary figures for 2020 show that 796 marriages and 5 civil partnerships were carried out. This is around half the number normally held in Highland in a year.  The Registration team felt the upset and disappointment this caused for so many couples.

Highland remains a hugely popular setting for weddings and civil partnership, as shown in some of the stunning photographs of ceremonies undertaken by the Registration team.

Civil Ceremony – Balnakeil Bay, Durness Conducted by Lesley Gray, Registrar

Highland Council currently has just over 40 full time equivalent staff in the Registration team and many undertake dual roles providing wider customer services too.

As well as registering births, death and marriages, the team also undertake marriage and civil partnership ceremonies (usually around 700 a year), citizenship ceremonies (around 100 a year from people migrating from all over the world), facilitate first-time Passport Interviews and offer family history searches through use of the ScotlandsPeople terminals in Inverness.

Civil Ceremony, Kinlochewe Conducted by Gillian Morrison, Assistant Registrar

Citizenship ceremonies have resumed albeit with much smaller numbers in attendance, with a new offering of a “virtual” ceremony which is proving very successful.  The Council awaits guidance from the Identity and Passport Service on how passport interviews may look in the future and hope ScotlandsPeople will reopen soon after appropriate health and safety risk assessments are carried out.

Chair of the Communities and Place Committee, Cllr Allan Henderson, said: “The report to the Communities and Place Committee today provides assurance about the quality of the Council’s service, how well it has adjusted to the changes needed through Covid and the plans for developing the service further.

"Customer feedback is very important to Highland Council and in the last survey of performance and attitudes from the Citizen’s Panel, it showed the local authority had a 73% net satisfaction rate, the third highest net satisfaction score out of 46 Council services surveyed."

Net satisfaction scores (the number of people satisfied minus the number of people dissatisfied) have been consistently above 70% for the Registration Service over the past five years, the highest being 74% in 2015.

Below are just some examples of the more complex enquiries Registrars respond to:

• discussion with medical colleagues around information provided on medical certificates of cause of death;
• complex paperwork in relation to marriage (visa requirements, foreign documents and reporting of a potential sham marriage);
• dealing with dispensations (special permission) for urgent marriage ceremonies (this may be due to terminal illness; or armed forces personnel being deployed to a war zone etc);
• change of name or declaration of paternity enquiries;
• dealing with requests for information for Police enquiries;
• dealing with difficult registrations where there has been relationship breakdown in households/families; and
• adoption enquiries.