Highland registrars 'continue to rise to the Covid-19 challenge'
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
Registrars have been praised after a positive external assessment by the National Registrars of Scotland (NRS).
Approximately 140,000 life events are registered in Scotland each year and Highland Council has the seventh highest number of events registered of Scotland's 32 councils, with around 6000 registrations normally recorded yearly.
According to the NRS, Highland registrars achieved 97 per cent accuracy for their records in 2019, with an examination of 2020 records currently under way.
Covid has had a significant impact on the estimated figures for 2020, with marriages and births both reduced.
Early assessment puts the number of registrations in Highland at 5369.
In 2019 there were 6196 and in 2018 there were 6365.
With birth registration initially suspended following the first lockdown the service built up a backlog of around 400 registrations which was cleared by September.
Many couples hoping to marry have had to change their plans over the past year.
Preliminary figures for 2020 show that 796 marriages and five civil partnerships were carried out. This is around half the number normally held in Highland in a year.
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 undertakes marriage and civil partnership ceremonies (usually around 700 a year) and citizenship ceremonies (around 100 a year) and facilitates first-time passport interviews and offers family history searches through use of the ScotlandsPeople terminals in Inverness.
Chairman of Highland Council's communities and place committee, Councillor 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 per cent 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 per cent for the registration service over the past five years, the highest being 74 per cent in 2015.
