Coronavirus: Blog – COVID-19: a matter of birth, love and death

Blog: Karen Burton, Shropshire Council’s coroners and registration service manager and superintendent registrar, looks at the challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic. 

In normal times, a registrar would meet hundreds of different people a week – celebrating a marriage or civil partnership, congratulating people on the birth of a precious child, or doing their best to make the awful experience of registering a death that little bit better.

But these are not normal times. We are no longer allowed to register births, no longer delivering ceremonies, and are currently not permitted to see people to deal with their legal preliminaries either.

All face-to-face contact with customers has disappeared since the coronavirus lockdown, and this has required a seismic shift in the way our services are delivered.

Here’s a summary of the situation since the start of lockdown:

Births

No births are being registered, and at time of writing there are no updates available from the Government for us to provide to anxious new parents on when they may be able to register their child’s birth.

The only advice we are able to give at the moment is that child benefit and universal credit applications can be made without the need for the birth to be registered.

Marriages and civil partnerships

All ceremonies until the end of June 2020 have been postponed, pending Government updates.

On Monday 11 May the Government published their intention to let “small” ceremonies take place, from 1 June at the earliest. At present we have no indication of what “small”means, but anticipate that this will be the legal minimum of two registrars, the couple, and two witnesses.

In addition to this, as hospitality settings, hotels and places of worship are not set to reopen until 4 July at the earliest, it would appear that this facility will be available only for those who have arranged to marry or have their civil partnership in a Register Office or licensed local authority ceremony room. It is not possible to vary the location for which couples have given notice to hold their statutory ceremony, without them having to give fresh notices and wait the statutory 28-day period.

Any ceremonies in registration offices or licensed ceremony rooms can only take place if social distancing requirements are able to be met. We are currently embarking on a programme of assessing whether any of the statutory rooms will be able to be used safely, and will be in touch with our couples to advise them further.

For couples with bookings for other locations and for after 4 July,  we hope to be able to honour them, but this is dependent upon Government guidelines. We will be keeping everyone in touch with developments.

So far, we have already rescheduled more than 400 ceremonies, with only a handful of cancellations: our team has been working flat out on this for the past few weeks.

As a result, we are now in a position to accept new bookings for civil ceremonies to take place in Shropshire within the next two years. Email registrars@shropshire.gov.uk and a member of our team will contact you.

We do understand couples’ frustrations with the current position; these are unprecedented times, and we are working hard, in line with national guidelines, to accommodate and support couples.

We would like to say a big thank you to the majority of customers who have been absolutely fantastic, helping us to reschedule all but a few ceremonies, which were for reasons beyond our control.

For example, Joe and Hannah wrote to say: “Thank you very much for such a prompt and efficient service, we really appreciate all your help at this difficult time.”

Angela and Phil said: “Many thanks for your response and for dealing with our request so quickly. We can’t thank you enough for rearranging this for us.”

And Maisie wrote to say: “Thank you so much for moving our wedding date – you must be so busy rearranging so many. We really appreciate the quick response we have had from you.”

We’ve also put an amnesty in place for couples with ceremonies booked in July, August and September 2020 regarding payments that are due, and advice has been issued over the last couple of days to these couples.

Deaths

Deaths are now being registered over the telephone. Our registrars are working from home, and we have a small core team at Shirehall to make sure all paperwork is processed as quickly as possible.

If you are unfortunate enough to be bereaved during this time, there will be no need to leave your home to either collect a medical certificate of cause of death from the doctor or the hospital, to register a death, or to visit a funeral director to give them the green form.

Instead, the GP or hospital doctor will email the medical certificate to the registration team who will make sure it has been completed correctly, and see whether the death needs to be referred for further investigation by our Coroners team.

All you need to do then is call Shropshire Council on 0345 678 9016 to tell us that you want to register the death. Our team will ask you for the following information:

• Your name and contact telephone number
• The name of the deceased
• Your relationship to that person
• Their date of death
• Their place of death

We will also ask for the name of the GP or hospital dealing with the death, so we can arrange for the medical certificate to be sent through as soon as possible, to minimise any more delays.

If you are worried about what the registrar will ask, you can find a breakdown on our website www.shropshire.gov.uk/bereavement-services/register-a-death/ Your funeral director will also have one of these templates.

This is an extremely challenging time, and we are trying hard to serve our customers and venues to the very best of our ability.

Our priority is to keep inconvenience and emotional hardship to an absolute minimum.