Rhodri, 1. One obvious benefit that you seem to have overlooked in the heat of your outrage is that, if this petition bears fruit , the Family History Societies you are championing **would be entitled to the necessary access to the registers** to perform the indexing you advocate -- as you say, at the moment it's hit-and-miss what they can do. But I would hardly call this "niche" information -- it's bread-and-butter for genealogy in England and Wales. 2. I believe Gareth is referring to the DoVe project: "A project, called DoVE (Digitisation of Vital Events), to digitise the GRO's records of birth, marriage and death was initiated in 2005. Implementation of the project was Outsourced to Siemens IT Solutions and Services in a three-year contract which expired at the end of July 2008. The process of scanning, digitising and indexing suffered severe delays, with only (roughly) half the records delivered by the end of the contract period. By mutual agreement between the IPS and Siemens, the contract was not extended. Digitisation of birth records up to 1934 and death records up to 1957 had been completed when the contract ended. The records that have been digitised – over 130 million of them – form part of a system (called EAGLE, for "Electronic Access to GRO Legacy Events") which is used within the GRO to fulfil requests for certificates from the general public. A different system, known as MAGPIE ("MultiAccess to GRO Public Index of Events"), was intended to make the indexes available to the public via a website, but this will not now be implemented. " (From Wikipedia). I do hope you will accept this as facts and figures and not opinions; if you don't like Wikipedia (even though it is not a commercial organisation), Google will return other substantiation, including this: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/11 8664/23788-civil-registration.pdf which gives some idea of the costs to date (£8.33m) and projected costs to complete (£25-30m). 3. I note you have not yet replied to my original response to your tirade, not have you accused me (yet) of having a commercial interest in the outcome, but for the avoidance of doubt: I am a genealogist AND a member of the public WITH NO commercial interest in the outcome (very similar to Guy Etchells, who has raised the petition). I will now "shut up" as you have so peremptorily exhorted those of us who disagree with you on this topic; or rather, I shall cease to debate it with you. Helen