"Thank you for your email of 14 June about the issuance of short form birth certificates. I am a Governor (and ex-trustee) of Coram, so I have asked them for our view on the issues that you have raised. The relevant part of Coram which has expertise in this area is Coram-BAAF.

This is the view of their legal department, as detailed below. I hope that you find this helpful.

A long form birth certificate is headed ‘Certificate of an Entry’ .  The long form contains details of the parents and child, including addresses, occupations, marital status and address of birth.

An adoption certificate has the same heading, but contains details of the adopters in place of the parents, and includes the date of adoption

The short form certificate is headed ‘Certificate of Birth’ contains only the name of the child, their sex and date and place of birth.

The short form is less useful as a form of identity.  The Passport Office, for example, will require a long form before issuing a passport.

Both forms of certificate are available on request from the General Register Office, at the same price (£12.50) and with the same access requirements. 

The short form was traditionally used by people who did not want to disclose potentially socially awkward personal details, for example that their parents were not married or that they were born in a prison.  It can also be used by adopted people who do not want to tell everybody who might request proof of identity (School, bank etc) the personal information that they have been adopted.  More prosaically, the short form used to be given out for free on registration, whereas the long form had to be paid for.

I accept that it does contain a fiction, in that the details will show that ‘John Smith, a boy, was born on 1 June 1970 in London’, whereas at the time of birth that particular child’s name would have been John Brown and that John Smith only became his name on adoption .

In the past the short form might have been the only form kept by adopters in order to conceal from the child that they were adopted.  I would expect this abuse of the short form certificate to be extremely rare in the current adoption climate due to the extensive training that adopters have about the importance to children of their background and roots and of being honest and open with adopted children.  All adopted adults have an entitlement to their full original birth registration (long form) and their full adoption certificate.

The short form certificate might still be used in that way in some private adoptions (for example step-parent adoptions?), but as the long form is increasingly required for official purposes I would expect this to be rare and unsustainable in most families.

As I read it, the concern of the Scottish Adult Adoptee Movement is that these short form certificates should not be provided to adopted people.  The alternatives seem to me to be to allow adopted people only to have a short form Birth certificate in their birth name, which would render it useless as a form of identity verification, or to insist that adopted people have a short form adoption certificate, so that everybody is clear that they are adopted.  Many adopted people choose not to share the very personal information that they are adopted with the public, and should be able to have the same simple form evidence of birth as the majority of the population.

While we would support any changes in the birth registration rules that would allow every person to have full details of both their genetic and legal backgrounds, this should not all be publicly available information.  The short form birth certificate serves a purpose for adopted people as well as others of maintaining their privacy.  Abolishing it should only be considered if a practical alternative is provided.

Regards"