One of the organisations invited on to the cemetery advisory group is the Association of Burial Authorities (ABA), which this month (November) held a reception in the new Parliamentary offices of Portcullis House, London, to launch the ABA/Zurich Municipal Guide to Management of Safety in Burial Grounds. It was also an opportunity to discuss safety in cemeteries.

Host for the event was Andrew Bennett MP, the chairman of the Select Committee inquiring into cemeteries.

Among the 30 guests at Portcullis House were representatives of church and local authorities and private cemetery operators SCI. Peter Shaw from Pearson Panke was also there with Topple Testers, devises used in Germany to exert a certain pressure (50kg in the German case) on headstones to test their safety. Too many memorials have failed at 50kg in the UK for the pressure to be considered appropriate here and a setting of 30kg has been suggested.

NAMM President Mike Critchley and members Keith Rackham and Peter Aspinall were at the reception along with Graeme Robertson, chairman of the Memorial Awareness Board (MAB).

It was clear from the discussion that safety in cemeteries is an issue and that memorial masons are as keen as anyone to ensure memorials are safe as toppling headstones are not good for business, neither are headstones laid flat by cemetery authorities concerned about the safety of the stones.

It was also clear that nobody wants to accept responsibility for policing the installation of stones. The masons said local authorities had to demand good practice and ensure it was carried out so that legitimate businesses would not be at disadvantaged by those saving money by cutting corners and in doing so putting people\'s lives at risk.

It was pointed out that 41 local and church authorities were considered to be employing best practice in their cemeteries - 41 out of around 10,500 authorities.

Not all of those authorities have cemeteries, however, and Andrew Bennett said, as his select committee had recommended, the first step should be to find out just how many cemeteries there were and who was responsible for them. The Government had said it would try to do that.

The memorial masons said that using a ground anchor fixing system for a lawn memorial like the one sold by NAMM would secure a lawn memorial but the system could add £50 to the cost of the memorial.

Unscrupulous masons might avoid that cost either to gain a price advantage on their memorials or to increase their profits. And once a memorial was fixed it was impossible just by looking at it to determine whether it was fixed properly or not. The fixing needed to be supervised and the local authorities had to supervise it.

The local authorities suggested that perhaps it was the responsibility of insurance companies to make sure the fixing was secure, which did not go down well with the representatives of insurers Zurich Municipal present.

This was clearly a sticking point and the ABA decided to form a small working group to try to resolve the matter. ABA chairman Sam Weller said they would report back before Christmas.