Grave concerns: Scarborough Council issues ‘myth-busting’ rebuttal over coverage of headstone inspections

A rebuttal of “factually incorrect” and “very misleading” national media coverage has been issued by Scarborough Council in its October newsletter to residents.

Following an announcement this summer that a safety audit of headstones would be taking place in local cemeteries, Scarborough Council received considerable press and radio coverage in national media.

The council said that to date “a sensitive audit of memorial headstones in the older sections of Woodlands cemetery in Scarborough has been taking place to check the headstones are stable and do not pose a safety risk” to visitors or staff.

The authority stated that “in contrast to how the story was portrayed in the media, no headstones have been damaged by our staff or contractors”, adding that the stones are not “pushed over” but if they pose an immediate safety risk “they may be carefully laid down and positioned face up so that the inscription can still be read”.

It added that it does its “very best to place the signs without obscuring the memorial text”.

In a work report prepared for an upcoming full meeting of the council, Cllr Tony Randerson, the cabinet member for neighbourhoods, also addressed the coverage.

Cllr Randerson stated: “Members may be aware of recent national media interest, articles in the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Mirror, stimulated by our memorial testing programme in the council-managed cemeteries.

“I would like to point colleagues to the council’s ‘myth busting’ article in this month’s residents’ news about this topic and do not intend to expand on it.”

Cllr Randerson also expressed his appreciation for the authority’s bereavement service staff “who have carried out more than 1,500 memorial tests over the last few months”.

In its residents’ newsletter, published on October 27, the authority said that “while it is not often we need to take issue with what the media says about us” it wanted “to bust a couple of what we’ll politely call myths that appeared in the media headlines”.

These included headlines which stated that the authority had “purged 50,000 headstones” or had “removed thousands of headstones”, whereas the council states it had conducted inspections of 1,386 headstones of which “only 110 have been carefully laid down”.