Graveyards and Burial Grounds

Good afternoon Mr. Cook. I shall start by quoting from ““SAIFinsight””, the voice of independent funeral planners. Page 20 of today's issue contains advice about how to give a good eulogy. My speech should be seen as a eulogy to the Minister, whose appropriate and detailed response will, I am confident, transform the situation regarding health and safety in burial grounds and graveyards across the country. I hope that she will do that to a time scale. Page 21 of the magazine notes its new publication, ““A Not So Jolly Christmas””, and gives advice on how to cope with bereavement at Christmas. That provides an appropriate time scale for action—which I am sure the Minister has considered—in which to reach local authorities and other burial authorities. Hopefully, when families make a Christmas visit to the grave of their loved ones, they will not be confronted with the indignity that huge numbers of my constituents have faced in recent years. I said huge numbers. There are 859 families in my constituency who have contacted me because their loved one's grave has been staked by an over-zealous burial authority. Those 859 families are in one constituency. I have researched the subject and have discussed it at length on a number of occasions with the kind assistance of the Minister, her advisers, officials and the Health and Safety Executive. I have also taken the precaution of finding out about health and safety myself. I am the only trained topple-tester of memorials in Parliament and one of only a few in the country. Therefore, I can categorically say that of those 859 staked graves, the vast majority—upwards of 90 per cent. if not 95 per cent.—are not unsafe at all but are perfectly safe. Those that I have tested would demonstrate that. What is going wrong? It is not the Health and Safety Executive. In 2007, a written answer stated:"““In 2004, the chairman of the Health and Safety Commission wrote to all local authorities setting out the need for a pragmatic approach to this very sensitive issue.””—[Official Report, 20 February 2007; Vol. 457, c. 610W.]" The problem is that some local authorities and others have not been listening. Instead of thinking pragmatically and understanding health and safety and the concept of risk assessment, local authorities have brought in private contractors and paid them a sort of piece rate, creating a perverse incentive for the contractor to stake or lay down the gravestones, deeming them to be unsafe whether they are or not. A fascinating comparator is the Church of England. That has as many burial grounds as local authorities but it gives responsibility for them to church wardens. Those people are volunteers—unpaid but highly professional. They are people about whom the words ““common sense”” and ““appropriateness”” immediately spring to mind in all their dealings and voluntary work. In my constituency and across the country, church wardens assess the risk of burial grounds by using common sense. Therefore, when I asked the Second Church Estates Commissioner, the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell) a question in Parliament on 5 June 2007, he was able to say that there have been no complaints about the policy and approach of the Church of England for the last 20 years. None. That compares with 859 complaints in my constituency alone. Church insurers say that the number of insurance claims they receive from the whole country—on any issue, not only successful claims—averages fewer than two per year. There is a small issue to address about health and safety, as there is throughout society, but it is not a big issue. As I researched the issue, I was amazed. I thought that only Bassetlaw council had decided, in its infinite madness, to stake all the gravestones. In fact, I found that it is happening all over the country—in Staffordshire, Sussex, from Herne bay to Whitley bay, Stoke, south London, Plymouth and in Blackburn with Darwen borough council. They once said that there were 4000 holes in Blackburn—now it is more like 4000 stakes.