Five-year plan for safety checks on Pendle gravestones (From Lancashire Telegraph)

Five-year plan for safety checks on Pendle gravestones

3:59pm Friday 27th June 2008 in

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PENDLE Council will test thousands of gravestones and memorials to make sure they are safe over the next five years at a cost of £40,000.

But bosses have said that unsafe gravestones and memorials will only be laid down as a last resort.

Grave owners will be asked to pay for those stones and memorials found to be unstable once they have been made temporarily safe.

The council has assured the tests will follow strict national guidelines set out in a special report by the ombudsman titled ‘memorial safety in local authority cemeteries’.

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Gravestone testing has caused controversy in other parts of East Lancashire.

At Pleasington Cemetery in Blackburn more than 2,700 graves have been labelled unsafe. And last month 900 families in Burnley and Padiham were told they would have to pay out to secure the safety of their relatives' gravestones.

Across Pendle six municipal cemeteries will be checked over along with 10 closed church graveyards.

The council last year hired memorial inspection officer Robert Careswell to undertake the tests.

Councillor Ann Kerrigan, who represents parks and cemeteries in Pendle, said: "We're doing this to ensure that visitors to graves and our staff who work in the cemeteries are not at risk from unsafe or damaged memorials.

“I want to reassure people that we will not be laying down any memorials unless it is absolutelyunavoidable, for example if they can't be made tempor-arily safe.

"I know that's something that relatives of the deceased would not want to happen at all.

"We will do what we can to make a memorial safe straightaway.

"Then we will write to the grave owner, usually the relatives, to let them know of their responsibility to put right any problems that we find when we do the test."

On Saturday, July 5 Mr Careswell and his colleagues will be giving a demonstration of how the tests are done in two sessions - one at 9.30am and another at 10.45am.

Notices to tell people that the safety inspections are happening have been put up around the cemeteries and on entrances.

Public notices will also be printed in local newspapers.

For more information about the memorial safety tests, you can contact Pendle Council's Bereavement Services Officer, Fred Stewart by calling (01282) 661596 or you can also email fred.stewart@pendle.gov.uk.