MP, ONS clash over electronic records outsourcing

Resistance is expected from Britain’s Members of Parliament over the Office for National Statistics’ move to outsource more than 160 years worth of records of English and Welsh births, deaths, and marriages. These records, dating back to 1837 are headed for Chennai, India-based facilities for digitization. Siemens Business Services has emerged as preferred bidder for the contract involving 250M records that as of the moment are not electronically accessible.

Support was expressed last year by members of the Commons regulatory committee, "Given the importance of both historical and new birth, death and marriage records we feel that to go ahead with these projects in spite of parliamentary concerns poses a significant risk to the future of the civil registration service." This comes on the heels of doubt on the senior public sector manager’s ability to monitor and audit private sector information technology outsourcing contracts – those involving sensitive data, especially.

However, an early motion up for hearing in the Commons today points out the need to "call upon the government to safeguard our population's sensitive personal information and to ensure that no potential new UK jobs are lost through this proposed offshoring".

It goes further in exhorting support for the committee’s recommendations "which demand proper and full scrutiny of the proposed digitization to ensure the nation's valuable births, deaths and marriages records contract is not offshored by any of the bidders".

The ONS has assured that no scanned documents would leave the country and "no paper copies would leave ONS-controlled locations".

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