900 families facing grave charges in Burnley and Padiham

10:23pm Monday 19th May 2008

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NINE hundred families in Burnley and Padiham will be told they must pay out to secure the safety of their relatives' gravestones.

The cost of the operation will range from £16.54, to bury kerbsets in graves, to £120 for the dismantling of larger stone crosses, pending discussions on the safest way to deal with the memorials.

Under a three-year maintenance programme, around 4,300 tombstones will be treated at Burnley's Rossendale Road and Padiham's St John's Road cemeteries.

Council bosses estimate that a slice of the costs of making the memorials safe can be recouped from approximately 900 owners of family plots at the graveyards, who can still be traced.

For years councils have been concerned about the health and safety implications of ageing tombstones, after a case in Salford where a child was fatally injured by an unsafe memorial on municipal land.

Inspections are currently taking place for all the memorials in the cemeteries, as part of the £184,000 scheme.

Yellow stickers have been placed on those thought to be unsafe - and signs have been installed to warn cemetery users about the prospect of unstable memorials.

Memorials which are deemed to be most at risk have been laid flat, for health and safety reasons, but this has happened in only a handful of cases so far.

The cemeteries at Burnley and Padiham have around 17,000 memorials in total. The inspections have been completed at Padiham and around half of the Burnley headstones have been covered to date.

Owners are set to be given three years to ensure their gravestones are made safe - or notices will be issued for the work to be carried out automatically.

The favoured option for many of the headstones, and the larger memorials, is to sink them into the ground, by a third of their original height.

Council bosses admit that these memorials will appear smaller than surrounding gravestones - and some of the inscriptions on them may be obscured.

Part of the project will involve a hardship fund being set up, for around 250 grave owners who may be on benefits.

In such cases the labour costs of £57 will be met by the authority, with owners expected to pay materials costs of around £50.

Cemeteries manager Simon Goff says in a report to councillors: "The council will provide advice to grave owners to help them arrange repairs.

"Advice in the form of updated leaflets, information on the council's website and face-to-face assistance at the cemetery office will help grave owners make arrangements to re-fix memorials.

"The council will also seek to negotiate a schedule of charges with local memorial masons that are registered to work in Burnley's cemeteries and provide this information to grave owners."

Mr Goff added: "If the memorial was erected within the last 40 years then we spend a lot of time going through our archives to find the owners.

"We also put a notice on the graves, asking them to contact us. With a lot of the older graves, people have moved on and in some cases the people who own the graves are buried within them."

If ultimately the owners do not agree to pay for remedial works to be carried out then the council's engineers will take appropriate safety action, which could include laying the headstone flat.

The council said that it had started to contact families whose graves had already been deemed to be unsafe.

Coun Tony Lambert, deputy Labour leader on Burnley council , said: "It is a very sensitive issue - especially if you think that it could be someone's father, mother or close relative involved, so you have to be careful."

New gravestones had been secured with retaining pin, between the base and headstone, to ensure greater stability.

Coun Lambert said he had also assisted a Trinity ward resident, whose memorial had only been erected for 18 months and was deemed unstable.

Similar exercises in Blackburn with Darwen, last year, provoked anger among bereaved relatives. Burnley council says it wished to carry out the project with sensitivity.