Mr. Tom Walsh:

The form of undertaking a person has to sign when making an application for a birth certificate, referred to on page 179 of the documentation in schedule 1, has four conditions.

There is no problem with the first condition because it is a standard one. Equally, there is no problem with the last condition. However, the two in the middle are complete nonsense, in our book, because they suggest that the person signing for the birth certificate will cease his or her effort at tracing at the point at which he or she gets the birth certificate. Time out of number, we have come across cases in which the first step taken by an adopted person who is trying to trace is to try to find his or her birth certificate. He or she will continue his or her work on the trace from there. The second and third conditions quite simply say "thou shalt not". They require the person to say "I will not go any further than this certificate", "I will not proceed with the threat", or "I will not ask anyone else to proceed with the threat for me". Those two conditions should be taken out. If the certificate itself has to be used, that is okay. We would prefer if it were not there at all. If a person is asked to sign a certificate to get his or her birth certificate, he or she is given a different status from someone else who does not have to sign at all.