While most eyes are naturally on the Election Court hearing the sometimes idiosyncratic business of Tower Hamlets council carries on.
On February 4, Lutfur Rahman’s cabinet met to discuss the question that has been a battle cry among some for almost a decade – a cemetery for Tower Hamlets.
As with most if not all inner London boroughs, there isn’t one. After plans to reopen Mile End’s deconsecrated Tower Hamlets Cemetery as a multi faith burial ground were roundly squashed in 2007, this issue has been a hardy election and petition perennial.
Respect pushed it particularly hard when they were a force under their own name and it has been something that Lutfur, aware of a grassroots demand, has been trying to deliver since he became mayor in 2010.
The obvious problem is that in inner London there is no space. Council officers have been trying to find solutions for years.
I last wrote about it here in 2013 when I reported that Lutfur had authorised a budget of £3m to find somewhere north east of the borough and “within the M25”.
Almost two years on, we learn from the report presented to cabinet this month that these efforts have come to nothing. Their attempts at doing a deal have collapsed after worries about the vendor’s ability to deliver planning permission.
It means that an unspecified amount has been wasted on legal fees, according to the cabinet paper.
But fear not, we’re told in councilspeak, because these costs will be recouped by savings they think they’re going to make on a deal with another cemetery they’ve located.
That cabinet paper notes the council is under no legal obligation to provide a burial site. It also says that under current arrangements, the council provides a £225 subsidy to families wanting to bury their loved ones – mainly at the City of London and Woodgrange Park cemeteries in Manor Park, and the Muslim Gardens of Peace cemetery in Hainault.
Burial plots aren’t cheap. A new private grave at City of London can cost £2,200 plus service fees; at Gardens of Peace, the charge is more like £2,700.
The demand for council subsidies and/or a longer term solution is understandable in somewhere like Tower Hamlets.
So it would be interesting to know how many people would agree with the proposals agreed at cabinet.
What proposals, you ask. Well, if you were to examine the cabinet report you wouldn’t know. The council hid the details in part 2 of its agenda, the “pink papers” section of the meeting that excludes the press and public on the grounds of apparent “commercial confidentiality”.
Perhaps you can be the judge of the merits of that. Here are those leaked pink papers:
And here’s my summary.
The cabinet has agreed to buy three acres of land at Kemnall Park Cemetery in Chislehurt, in the borough of Bromley…for £3m. The report states this is enough land for 3,000 burial plots, which they reckon will be filled within 15 years (at 200 plots a year).
Kemnal Park is an existing private cemetery, just off the A20.
The council reckons it would take about 25minutes for people in Tower Hamlets to drive there. That may be so for the zombies of Mulberry Place, but as the more alert well know the travel time back northbound through the Blackwall Tunnel is usually far longer.
At 4.30pm this afternoon the journey time from Whitechapel, according to Google maps was about 40minutes.
Anyhow, I’m not sure that’s the main issue (and there’s perhaps a wider one about maintaining links to east London. Manor Park and Hainault certainly do that).
Here are the finances.
As well as the £3m capital cost, there seems to have been something of a disagreement between officers and Lutfur on ongoing annual revenue expenditure.
Officers wanted to recoup this £3m by making an annual profit from the selling of graves. Under the officers’ proposal, the council would commit to buying 200 plots each year over 15 years at a cost of £1,000 each.
Officers calculated that if they then charged residents £2,237 for each burial fee, the cost to the taxpayer over 15 years would then be zero.
However, paragraph 7.7 of the leaked report reveals that Lutfur wanted to charge just £650 per burial, citing Waltham Forest council’s policy as an example. According to officers’ calculations, running at a loss in that way would mean an extra ongoing cost to the taxpayer of £70,000 a year.
Adjusted for inflation over the 15 year term, that would be an average of £83k per annum. In total, the capital and revenue costs together would be £3.8m.
Is that vale for money?
Is this something money should be spent on? What is the opportunity cost, what else could/should this be spent on?
What do you think?
They should make cremation compulsory. Job done.
All quiet on The Royal Courts of Justice front I see. The former Socialists Rapist Party members who now run the Counterfire site have also gone shtum on this one. Have the learned friends been in touch?
Am afraid this doesn’t meet my taste test so am deleting the comment. Please keep comments civilised at least. Thanks
If you live in central london you cannot expect a burial space. They should perhaps have funereal earns or something and put all the family ashes in one big pot, like Amazonian tribes do…. if it matters to them so much for religions reasons why not pay for the body to be flown to Bengal and bury it there in the home village.
This is just pandering to special interest groups using money we all have a share in YET AGAIN.
I think my last comment was deleted due to poor taste. It’s hard to keep up the standard of decorum when commenting on Loony Lutfur’s behaviour.
I can still see it. It went up at 9.01 today and has seven approvals to four against. Is that the one?
It was the one about burying THF. I’d better not say anymore…..
Grave Maurice – Really? Remove my right to be buried next to my parents? Remove my rights to visit the graves of my loved ones? You have a right to your views, they certainly are not mine, and probably many others.
Well, in an ideal world, many folks would like to be buried in family graves. There are many reasons why this is not practical for everyone:
Lairs usually allow 3 bodies for a great many years;
Not all families live within easy reach of these cemetries.;
Cost of transporting a corpse several hundred or thousands of miles can be prohibitive.
Under these circumstances and when time and finances are favourable I am in favour of cremation and scattering the ashes on the family grave wherever it may be.
There is nothing to prevent the headstone being inscribed to include the deceased.
In Germany you have to pay for your cemetery plot, 15 years at a time. If your family choose not pay you get moved to a communal grave and the grave site gets released to another family. As a result it is quite common for families to share graves which I always liked the idea of.
So far as I am aware there is at present no statutory requirement on any public authority or private undertaking to make available a place for burial (I hope no meddling government has changed that). Whilst I’ve been out of the Hamlets for a few years, when the issue was last raised regarding the reopening of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park for burials I was not aware of any strong demand for such a facility within the community within the borough, aside from what was described as a ‘small business interest’. In my view, no local authority in its right mind would take on such a responsibilty if it did not have to. The issues (as quick look at the Association of Burial Authorities newsletter would reveal) are always emotional and the burial authority likely to be on the losing end of bad publicity.
Cremation is not acceptable to all belief, personal or religious, and there has been a growth in demand for burial space, but a cemetery is not just a collection of holes in the ground, it requires considerable management, and is best left to the private sector dedicated to such roles to my mind. There is no shortage of other (statutory) challenges for local authorities to meet and no sign that the funding of them is likely to improve.
As we have both mentioned the event taking place at The Royal Courts of Justice is there any news that can be made public?
How long is the whole thing likely to take for a start and, therefore, how far are we through it?
Will Lutfur be called to give evidence and if so what are the bets that he will perform as badly as he did on the first Dispatches programme when grilled by Gilligan?
The fall out from this, which I am sure can be discussed here, will reflect badly on a number of people most of whom are now keeping quiet or have folded their tents and slunk away in the night.
The biggest damage will be to people like Michael Meacher MP the owner of the website Left Futures which basically sees the whole thing as an Islamophobic Blairite conspiracy against a genuinely socialist Mayor who is defying the Tory cuts when all about him have given in.
A similar tack is taken by The Guardian in several articles and as far as I know still is by occasional writer and blogger Dave Hill. The rest of the chorus has been the out and out loony left led by the Socialist Rapists Party and their former comrades in arms now known as Counterfire. Both are still currently big on the Islamophia conspiracy even though the leading light of that, the former Livingstone employee Bob Pitt, has packed up and no longer posts on his site Islamophobiawatch.
Speaking of the Kenster who has done so much damage to Tower Hamlets and Labour have a look at the speakers at the AGM of the Socialists Rapists Party front Unite Against Fascism, http://www.obv.org.uk. I don’t think so many wannabees and has beens has been brought together on one occasion ever!
That should have been http://www.uaf.org.uk. but it seems OBV are attending to their shame. How anyone could get up on a platform with the organisers, and some of the speakers, beggars belief.
I should have said. The proposed cemetery is indeed about forty minutes from Tower Hamlets by car. By public transport it’s more like two hours and very expensive.
So does this mean that the Council will also be making grants to those who choose to cremate their relatives – or is Mayor Rahman yet again picking and choosing the people who he chooses to favour with subsidies? (Now where did I get that idea from I wonder?)
I reckon there’s scope for a legal challenge on this one given that this is not a statutory duty.
There’s very definitely scope to challenge via the Commissioners what on earth the financial equation looked like given there is also an imperative to be completely transparent about all payments made by the Council above a certain amount. What on earth is their excuse for commercial confidentiality and putting the figures in Part II? The use of Part II for the costings associated with different options has become quite ludicrous as the years have passed in LBTH.
In my grandparents day, people used to save something every week for their own burials. So why exactly did this idea go out of fashion?
IMO if you have very definite ideas about wanting to be buried then you also need to take responsibility while living for your own burial costs – this isn’t something which should be coming out of public funds.
The Council would do very much better to place an emphasis on encouraging proper regular savings schemes for those who want to make provision for their choice of what they want done with their body after they have died – irrespective of whether that is burial or cremation.
That’s the ONLY way to be fair to ALL members of this community.
http://tinyurl.com/kgwzl74
Any Tower Hamlets resident who has passed away and is interred within either the City of London Cemetery, Wanstead or Gardens of Peace Cemetery, Hainault, will qualify for a payment of £225 towards the cost of their burial expenses. This is payable after the funeral takes place.
This service is currently only offered for burials.
What about cremations? I am unaware of TowerHamlets having a local crematorium. Hearses to transport bodies outside of Tower Hamlets, whether for a burial or a cremation, cost more for all residents not only those favouring burial. A bit unfair, IMHO.
£2237 less £650 is a cost to all council taxpayers of £1487per burial.A heck of a lot more than the current subsidy of £225. Of course, again this would be for burials only. A tad unfair, again!
As ycmiu said, people saved for their funerals with small weekly insurance policies. There was shame in leaving debt! Shame not a popular LBTH concept.
I’ve now read the report – and I’ve not seen quite such a convoluted and sloppy report in quite some time.
Here’s a few things it fails to identify
1) the costs of the client side operation re commissioning, contracting and monitoring
2) the cost of the client side to assess, determine and operate the means tested criteria for identifying the “deserving poor” (aka as “vulnerable families in the poorest communities” (para 3.1) – because if this is a facility for poor families then obviously those with the ability to pay will need to be weeded out!!
3) whether the cost of the burial has taken into account the commissioning, financial assessment and administration costs for c. 200 burials per year – plus the additional numbers who will apply but will be deemed to be not eligible as “deserving poor” (and let’s just think for a moment about the “costs” of this re. community cohesion!)
4) the costs of terminating any contract should a future administration of LBTH (or, lets say, a larger East London Authority as seems likely at some point) decide that this non-statutory function is of minimal priority – ALWAYS a very important consideration with respect to any non-statutory provision.
5) the specific legal authority for this council to subsidise travel costs for funerals
6) the prospective legal costs should any member of the public decide that any decision to pursue a purchase should be taken to Judicial Review.
7) whether any or all of the above costs should always be recovered via an unsubsidised cost of burial fee
My recollection is that the only thing this Council is actually required to do is dispose of the bodies of people who were fished out of the river if they could not be identified. In the past, they were buried in unmarked and communal pauper’s graves. I’m guessing they are now sent for cremation and the Council pays for the cremation costs.
So is this Council proposing that really vulnerable people who commit suicide should be sent for cremation but that people belonging to “vulnerable families in the poorest communities” who can’t be organised enough to save for their own burials should get their own grave at a subsidised rate?
Picking and choosing again as to who Rahman favours with subsidies? It does’t look good does it?
BTW what was the result of the discussion at Cabinet and is it ‘binding’?
Regardless of the rights or wrongs of this, funeral poverty does seem to be becoming a real issue. Here is a link to a charity http://www.quakersocialaction.org.uk/Pages/Category/funeral-poverty-campaign working in this area that are based in Tower Hamlets.
Nobody denies there’s a problem. We’re debating the right solution.
As I said, people many years ago were a great deal worse off than people are today but took it upon themselves to make sure they had a decent pot of cash to cover their funeral costs
We shouldn’t be promoting initiatives which provide absolutely no incentive for people to be independent and to look after themselves.
On the contrary we should be helping people with schemes which make life easier when it comes to saving up for a funeral.
Bottom line this Council has statutory obligations which are not being met at present which rank higher than paying for people’s funerals.
To be honest I’m really disappointed this blog is not covering the trial going on. Anyone got any suggestions of sites where there is regular news on that?
I’m afraid I’m not able to attend and so unable to comment fairly.
I appreciate you have a day job to do. I hope it’s working out.
4:30pm on any day going through these routes is gonna be double the time. You probably don’t own a car or drive, or just trying to whip up some news. Next item please (if there is any?!)