FOCUS GROUP ON BEREAVEMENT SERVICES

Saffron Hill Cemetery

At the Cathedral Centre, St Martins, this evening, for a different sort of meeting of Leicester Council of Faiths - well, certainly different from any I've attended during my time working for them. A focus group session involving members of the full Council of Faiths and invited guests (mainly representatives of the Muslim Burial Council for Leicestershire). We meet at the Cathedral Centre, for a presentation and discussion on Leicester City Council's Bereavement Services. Bereavement Services is undergoing its first formal review since 2003.

The presentation is led by Richard Welburn, Head of Parks and Green Spaces, Leicester City Council (with four City Councillors in attendance). Bereavement Services is part of the City Council's Parks and Green Spaces Service. It provides for burial, cremation, grounds maintenance of cemeteries and administration. It employs 25 staff and runs four cemeteries and one crematorium.

We're introduced to the historical background, facts and figures and legislative requirements currently affecting provision of bereavement services and the operational procedures determining how these services are delivered. There are four cemeteries in Leicester today:

• Welford Road (est 1849) which is included in the Register of Historic Landscape and is closed for new burials;
• Belgrave (est 1881) which is closed for new burials;
• Gilroes (est 1902) which is the location of Leicester's crematorium;
• Saffron Hill (est 1931) which is included in the Register of Historic Landscape, the Chapel Lodge and Gates of which are grade II listed.

We're told about current challenges faced by this service in the city:

• mercury abatement (there's a statutory requirement to reduce the amount of mercury vapour emitted into the atmosphere from fillings in the teeth of those being cremated);
• acquisition or extension of burial land (Gilroes has 3-4 years estimated capacity at current levels, Saffron Hill 5-6 years, less if proposed land extension to Gilroes doesn't proceed);
• memorial safety (a sensitive subject since memorials remain the property of the family of the decease and their upkeep is not the City Council's responsibility);
• systems (much information related to this service is recorded manually, it's costly to transpose large amounts of such records onto computer, large amounts of staff taken up with answering questions about historic burials that can require lengthy, complex and manual searches);
• multi faith provision.

While many of us would probably be interested in some or all of these issues, it's this last one that concerns the Council of Faiths most - obviously. In terms of serving the diverse faith communities of Leicester, the Jewish Torah was opened at Gilroes in 1902; a Muslim Janazgah was at Saffron Hill in 1985, and Hindu, Sikh and Jain facilities were introduced at Gilroes in 1989. The biggest challenge facing the Parks and Green Spaces Service in this topic area now is the provision of additional mourner accommodation at Gilroes.

Parks and Green Spaces identifies the main risk for this review as being "that individual religious groups think independently and pursue self interest." And their solution? "By using the Council of Faiths as an intermediary, rather than meeting with individual focus groups, we hope to mitigate the likelihood of this occurring."