"Fraud gang stole dead child's ID"

From the BBC:

John Dempsey Hamilton's birth certificate was one of 44 obtained online and used to apply for driving licences with which to open bank accounts and defraud over £20,000... The crime came to light in February 2009 when staff at the DVLA headquarters in Swansea realised that multiple applications for driving licences were being made from the same handful of addresses...

As anybody who's ever read a spy thriller knows, getting hold of the birth certificate of a child who has died is the oldest trick in the book. While I'm no big fan of 'the database state', I do wonder how much it would cost the Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths to merge his (or her) records, so that in future, the birth certificate of somebody who has died also shows the date of death. We could stick dates of any marriages and divorces on there as well for certain purposes (such as when people apply to get married).

Further, as I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the easiest way to track down fraudulent IDs is when there are too many people living in the same address (of which I have first hand experience, the anti-terrorism guys were most interested in what I handed over to them).