I rise to urge the House to support this Bill to give new powers to the owners of New Southgate cemetery in my constituency. As things stand, within 10 years we will run out of burial space there, or we will come close to doing so. There is now a widely held view that the only way in which the public can continue to have affordable, accessible cemeteries is if we make better use of existing burial space.
As we have heard, public burial authorities in London already have some powers to lift and deepen existing graves that were last used 75 years ago, in order to create more space. The Bill would simply give to New Southgate cemetery broadly the same rights as those already afforded by Parliament to public burial authorities in London.