Lewes Council in Sussex is to reinstate 460 headstones knocked over by contractors they employed to carry out safety checks using a 50kg topple tester.

They have contacted memorial masons in East and West Sussex to ask them to tender for the reinstatement work and expect to appoint a company for the job in August. They expect the work to take about a month to complete and have budgeted for it to cost £25,000.

The flattened headstones led to an adjournment debate being initiated in Parliament by Lewes MP Norman Baker.

He asked Home Office Minister Beverley Hughes (since reshuffled) how she could reconcile the Lewes experience with the fact that in Eastbourne, another Sussex town where similar tests were carried out, just three headstones failed.

(In fact, Eastbourne Council says it has never given anyone a figure of how many headstones failed its tests and that it does not have enough staff to check the records to see what the figure was.)

In reply to Norman Baker, the Minister said: "I accept that more work is needed to bring appropriate expertise to bear and to promote common standards."

She gave an assurance that she would take up all the matters raised and feed them into the work of the Burial & Cemeteries Advisory Group that was set up by the Home Office as a result of a Select Committee on Cemeteries report last year.

Owen Clifford, responsible for cemeteries in Lewes, said 460 headstones failed the topple test when it was carried out earlier this year - about 10% of the stones tested.

Worryingly, the highest failure rate was recorded among newer, lawn memorials - 26% of them failed. Clifford feels confident the test did identify memorials that were dangerous. "There\'s no doubt they were dangerous and people could have been hurt," he told NSS. "We had an independent assessment carried out of all the memorials that were laid flat." The assessment was carried out by David Francis, a technical committee member of the National Association of Memorial Masons (NAMM). In three cases Francis thought damage might have been caused to the memorials as a result of the test itself. In all the others he attributed the failures to the fixing, the most common problem being a lack of foundations and dowells.

Owen Clifford admitted that, like many other authorities, Lewes had not imposed standards on the fixing of memorials. It had restricted the type of memorial it would allow, but not the quality of the memorial or of its installation.

He said since the topple test had been carried out Lewes had adopted the NAMM Recommended Code of Working Practice.

The council had decided ratepayers should bear the cost of reinstating the memorials because it could only identify the owners of 150 of the stones that had been laid flat.

Owen Clifford has now accepted an invitation by Sam Weller to join the Memorial Safety Advisory Group of which Weller is chairman.

The Group was established to advise the government as the result of a meeting organised by the Association of Burial Authorities in the Government\'s Portcullis House last November.