Papers & Speakers*

This paper will examine the Private Sector, its history, current standing, and the role it has to play in the future development of the cremation industry in the U.K.

Adrian was educated at the University of London and on leaving University in 1975 joined KPMG. He qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1978 and worked in accountancy practice for KPMG and Grant Thornton until 1989 when he joined Westerleigh Group as Finance Director at inception of the company. Since that date he has been involved in the development of more new crematoria than anyone in the history of the movement.

Member of Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities’ Executive and Technical Committee since 2000. Former President of the Federation and chairman of CAMEO.

The current guidance note on crematoria (PG 5/2(04)) is in the process of the 6 yearly review by DEFRA. This presentation looks at the progress of the review process so far, its declared aims and the areas which will be and could possibly be affected.

Andrew is Vice President, Technical Affairs of Facultatieve Technologies who are the world market leader in the field of design, construction and maintenance of incinerators and cremation equipment. Andrew entered the incineration and cremation industry in 1973 after graduating with a first class honours degree in Fuel and Combustion Engineering from the University of Leeds. With Evans Universal Ltd he became Technical Manager in 1978 and Technical Director in 1993 and Vice President of Facultatieve Technologies in 2001. He is a member of the Energy Institute (of which he is Honorary Secretary of the Yorkshire Branch), a member of the Combustion Engineering Association and a Chartered Engineer. Andrew was a member of the DEFRA Working Group for the revision of the Process Guidance Note PG5/2 the Secretary of State’s Guidance for Crematoria.

Resomation® is the new disposition alternative to cremation with environmental benefits. It was presented back at the ICBCE 2007 conference and created much positive discussion. The process has moved on from then and Resomation Ltd would like to share the advances in design, legislation and marketing channels for Resomation.

In the last year Resomation Ltd was winner of the 2009 John Logie Baird Awards Programme and 2010 Jupiter Big Idea Award category of the Observer Ethical Awards.

This session considers what are perceived to be the strengths and weakness of the process, whether or not its introduction and regulation is to be welcomed, and if so how best this can be achieved preferably with government involvement and support.

Moderator: Mr Harvey Thomas CBE

Panel:

Sandy Sullivan, BA (Hons), Managing Director, Resomation Ltd
Sandy founded Resomation Ltd in May 2007 and is currently the Managing Director. Resomation Ltd is dedicated to the promotion of the resomation process which is an alternative to cremation with environmental benefits.

Scottish of birth he has a degree in Biochemistry. Before Resomation Ltd Sandy was European President for an American Company based in Scotland involved in Biological Safety and promoting Alkaline Hydrolysis technologies in the area of animal disposition. Prior to that he worked for another American Corporation STERIS for 10 years as European Vice President of their pharmaceutical sterilisation division.

Earlier in his career Sandy worked for the American Millipore Corporation for 15 years in the area of separation and purification technologies.

Peter Mitchell, Peter Mitchell Associates
Peter has worked in the bereavement services sector for over 27 years. His involvement has been direct and personal at operational and management levels in both public and private sectors.

In addition to his experience within cemeteries and crematoria, Peter is well known for his exhumation activities, which have been featured in 5 TV programmes and in 2009 he addressed this conference on the subject of his Egyptian project.

Peter is an independent consultant on all matters relating to burial, cremation and exhumation.

Colin Rickman, Dip.F.D., BIE, UK Business Development & Standards Manager, Co-operative Funeralcare
Colin studied engineering at Southampton and changed career in 1973 to train as a Funeral Director/Embalmer with a family funeral director in Poole. He joined the Co-operative Funeral Service in 1981 and since then has held various Senior Management roles including the management of crematoria, cemeteries, woodland burial grounds and hospital mortuaries/bereavement services. During his 37 years in the funeral profession Colin has taken a key role in many bereavement care organisations. Past President: Bournemouth & District Association of Funeral Directors, The Co-operative Funeral Service Managers’ Association. Member of The London Association of Funeral Directors. Past Governor of Lions Clubs International.

Roger Arber, Secretary, The Cremation Society of Great Britain
Roger is Secretary of The Cremation Society of Great Britain and Managing Director of the London Cremation Company plc. He was Secretary-General of the International Cremation Federation from 1990 to 2004 when he retired and became Senior Vice-President until 2007. He is also the Editor of Pharos International and a Trustee of the Golders Green Foundation.

This presentation provides an overview of developments in the cremation movement in Sweden including proposed changes to legislation that are presently under consideration.

Ulf Lagerström holds a Master of Laws (LLM) degree (University of Stockholm) and is a Chamberlain of the Royal Court of Sweden. He has been a Director at the Ministry of Finance; Senior Vice-President of Nordbanken; General Counsellor and Head of the Department of Legal and Administrative Affairs of the Church of Sweden and Managing Director of The Swedish Federation of Cemeteries and Crematoria (of which he is now a Trustee) and Ignis Insurance Group. He is a past President of the International Cremation Federation (1997-2005).

Ahmed will cover the following issues in his presentation:

• Governance and interdepartmental roles and responsibilities for managing excess deaths resulting from pandemic flu
• Swine flu and lessons learnt
• Update on pandemic flu management of death planning.

Ahmed has worked in the Civil Service for a number of years, undertaking a range roles including Private Secretary to the Home Secretary and as the Home Affairs Attaché to the Czech Presidency of the EU.

He now leads the Home Office Pandemic Flu Coordination Team since July 2007. In this role he has represented the Home Office in Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR) meetings.

Simon will provide delegates with an update on progress with reforming the process of death certification in England and Wales. He will also outline key next steps and the timetable for implementation of the reforms.

Simon Bennett is the Head of NHS Clinical Governance at the Department of Health and is responsible for policy development across all aspects of clinical governance as a key lever for promoting quality and patient safety in healthcare. This includes implementation of key aspects of the 3rd and 5th Reports of the Shipman Inquiry, including the programme to improve the process of death certification in England and Wales.

Simon is a senior civil servant and has worked in several different policy areas within the Department of Health, as well as in the Department of Trade and Industry and the Cabinet Office. He has also been seconded to a Strategic Health Authority. Simon is married, has three children and lives in West Yorkshire.

The presentation will cover a number of issues

• review of the Cremation (England and Wales) Regulations 2008;
• funeral pyres
• alternatives to cremation; and
• coroner reform.

Judith Bernstein has been leading the Ministry of Justice’s Current Coroner Policy Team since 2005. She has an MA in Modern History from St Anne’s College Oxford and an LLM from University College London. She qualified as a solicitor and started her Civil Service career advising the Social Security and Child Support Commissioners before transferring to an administrative post at the Judicial Studies Board, and then to a policy role in the area of administrative justice (tribunals, ombudsmen, inquiries and inquests).

In her current role Judith is responsible for providing advice to Ministers, coroners and others on coroner and cremation law and policy, including high-profile inquests and alternatives to cremation and invasive post mortems, as well as dealing with the day-to-day handling of policy and casework, correspondence from MPs, coroners and the general public. Judith also works with other Government Departments and liaises with the Third Sector on areas of mutual policy interest or specific inquests, as well as overseeing the coroner training programme.

Judith also has the policy lead in the Ministry of Justice on the operation of the Inquiries Act 2005, and advises Ministers and others on issues in relation to the establishment and running of public inquiries more generally.

Closed churchyards are a frequent source of uncertainty for local authorities charged with their maintenance. Just how far is an authority expected to go in responding to requests from church authorities and what are the minimum standards that the law requires?

This paper will review the current law on the local authority management of closed churchyards. Obligations upon the local authority for the maintenance of trees, memorials and other features within churchyards will be considered, along with the procedures for closure and the relevant grounds that an authority may advance to oppose the closure of a churchyard.

The speaker will also explore the process and rationale for the transfer of closed churchyards to local authority control and will review a number of recent court cases in which these duties and responsibilities were considered.

Changes to the law are currently being considered by the Ministry of Justice. The paper will highlight some of the amendments that are under review by the Ministry, and will offer some thoughts on the further reforms that may be appropriate.

John is a professional Bereavement Services Manager with Chesterfield Borough Council and has a career spanning almost 45 years in local government. He trained in horticulture at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, and later in countryside recreation management at Sheffield Hallam University. Whilst working as Assistant Cemeteries Manager at Sheffield, and as Superintendent and Registrar of Cemeteries and Crematorium at Rotherham, he obtained the Diploma in Burial and Cremation Administration and the Diploma in Park and Recreation Administration.

John is a holder of the Eickhof Medal of the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management. He currently serves on the Executive and Technical Committees of the Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities, the Management Board of the British Register of Accredited Memorial Masons (BRAMM) and the Steering Group of the Crematoria Abatement of Mercury Emissions Organisation (CAMEO). He is a former Director of the Institute of Cemeteries and Crematorium Management (ICCM) and also represents the FBCA on the Burials and Cemeteries Advisory Group of the Ministry of Justice.

This will be a joint presentation by Dr. Richard Earl and Peter Mitchell discussing various considerations required when developing a new cemetery including

• The Environment Agency’s requirements/criteria
• Conducting risk assessments
• Mitigating risk to the environment
• Case study

Dr Richard Earl joined the academic staff of Cranfield University in 1987 where he became Leader of the Engineering Group. His research career has developed in the inter-related areas of Soil Mechanics and Soil Environment Engineering. This has provided an ideal basis for his current appointment as Managing Director of TGMS Limited which specialises in the provision of technical support for the development of new cemetery developments. Richard is a Visiting Fellow of Cranfield University, has published widely in the academic press, is a Chartered Engineer and has over 20 years of consultancy experience relating to soil and water engineering.

Peter Mitchell has worked in the bereavement services sector for over 27 years. His involvement has been direct and personal at operational and management levels in both public and private sectors.

In addition to his experience within cemeteries and crematoria, Peter is well known for his exhumation activities, which have been featured in 5 TV programmes and in 2009 he addressed this conference on the subject of his Egyptian project.

Peter is an independent consultant on all matters relating to burial, cremation and exhumation.

This presentation explains the application of ecclesiastical law to cemeteries and closed churchyards; need to apply for faculties for work on memorials; legal rights and duties concerning both listed and unlisted monuments; and current trends.

Timothy Briden is a Barrister, Inner Temple, since 1976 specialising in ecclesiastical law. He is Chancellor of the Diocese of Bath & Wells since 1993, Chancellor of the Diocese of Truro since 1998 and Deputy Chancellor of the Diocese of Bristol since 2005. He succeeded Dr Sheila Cameron QC as Vicar-General of the Province of Canterbury in 2005. His official title is: “The Right worshipful Timothy Briden M.A., LL.B., Vicar-General of the Province of Canterbury”; a much shorter, quite sufficient style is: Chancellor Timothy Briden, M.A., LL.B. He is Chairman of the Ecclesiastical Judges Association since 2008 and succeeded Dr Sheila Cameron QC as Patron of the Association of Burial Authorities in January 2010

David will give a review of three qualifications available to memorial masons and look at changes to the British Standard and to the NAMM Code of Practice. He will also discuss the implication of these issues when choosing an appropriate registration scheme.

David has twenty years’ experience in teaching and management and also spent ten years in the memorial industry developing memorial stabilising systems. He was a NAMM Education Officer and served on the NAMM Technical Committee. He was also an NVQ assessor in the memorial industry as well as a judge for the Cemetery of the Year Awards. For the last 12 months he has held the position of BRAMM Development Officer.

The installation of mercury abatement plant provides an ideal opportunity for Cremation Authorities to review their facilities and standards of service delivery. In West Bromwich this resulted in an initial proposal to refurbish the existing facility, morphing into the building of a new iconic crematorium - whilst remaining within an already allocated budget. Brendan and the architect Martin Critchell will describe some of the key elements in this process.

Brendan commenced as a trainee in Wolverhampton in 1980. He has worked in London, Cheltenham and Cardiff, and is currently Bereavement Services Manager for Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council. He has been a tutor, examiner and Director of the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management and is currently Manager of the CAMEO abatement scheme.

Martin Critchell has run an architects’ practice in Chichester since 1978, and specialises in residential work, medical centres and crematoria. He has been involved with the cremation movement since 1985, when he designed the replacement fire damaged chapel at Randalls Park for The Great Southern Group.

This was followed by the design of new crematoria for Bodmin, Aberystwyth, Nuneaton and Irving, a new waiting room complex for Oxford and more recently a new chapel for Worthing. He believes that good design can improve the experience for the bereaved and considers that West Bromwich will be his best yet!

At 99.8% Japan has the highest cremation rate of any country in the world. In this paper we will be given an update on new cremation facilities and developments taking place.

Dr Eguchi is President of Taiyo Chikuro Industries Co Ltd, one of the largest manufacturers of cremator equipment and cremation services in Japan. He is also the International Cremation Federation Representative, Regional Economic Commission for Asia and the Pacific.

Modern cremation came early to Scotland, with the opening of Maryhill in 1895 by the Scottish Burial Reform and Cremation Society. However, Glaswegians were not easily persuaded to switch from burial and the second crematorium was not built for 34 years. The rapid success of Warriston, Edinburgh, opened in 1929 was not only a great achievement for Scottish cremationists but stimulated the building for four more crematoria by 1939.

This pair of papers describes how the revival of the cremation concept inspired two local authorities to build Scotland's first municipal crematorium. A first attempt by Glasgow City Council ended in failure in 1931 after four years work. Lanarkshire County Council made better progress and secured some funding by 1939. The project, postponed by the War, was resumed in 1945 and Daldowie was finally opened in 1955. Glasgow City Council resumed crematorium plans in 1951 and opened The Linn in 1962.

Special attention will be given to the architecture and landscape design of Daldowie and The Linn. The papers will analyse how these two crematoria represent critical features in the movement to cremation in modern Scotland.

Peter C. Jupp is a minister of the United Reformed Church. He was Director of the National Funerals College Project 1992-7. With Glennys Howarth, he founded the International Conference on ‘The Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal’ and the quarterly journal Mortality. He has co-edited several books in death studies and published From Dust to Ashes: cremation and the British way of death in 2006. He serves on the Council of the Cremation Society of Great Britain and was its Chairman 2001-9. He is a non-executive director of the London Cremation Co plc. With a team based at Durham University, he is now researching the development of cremation in modern Scotland.

Hilary is Dean of Quality Assurance and Academic Development at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. A graduate of Leeds University, she is an architectural and design historian, and has taught in Higher Education at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels for over thirty five years. A specialist in late nineteenth and early twentieth century English domestic architecture and design, she is a leading authority on the late Victorian architect Sir Ernest George and on the architecture of British crematoria and has published and lectured widely in these areas. Her book ‘Death Redesigned’ was published in 2006 and her new book ‘The Architecture of Sir Ernest George and Partners’ is to be published at the end of this year. She is a Trustee of the Victorian Society, a Trustee and Council Member of The Cremation Society and a UK Universities Institutional Auditor.

We learn about the work of Dying Matters which is a broad based and inclusive national coalition of just under 7,000 members, which aims to change public knowledge, attitudes and behaviours towards death, dying and bereavement. In 2009 the National Council for Palliative Care set up the Dying Matters Coalition to promote public awareness of dying, death and bereavement. Members include organisations from across the NHS including voluntary and independent health and care sectors as well as a wide range of faith organisations and the funeral sector.

John joined Luther Pendragon in 2008 after spending 20 years of his working life in the Third Sector, where he developed and implemented inspiring high profile public campaigning, major fundraising, brand and stakeholder engagement initiatives. He was previously Director of Marketing and Communications for The Scout Association where he led a new pro-active approach to integrated communication. John has also worked for Oxfam, MENCAP, in the live entertainments industry and within the Student Union Movement. John has front line UK and international experience as a media spokesperson, communications officer and crisis communications manager.

Luther Pendragon is one of the UK’s leading communications consultancies. It manages all types of communications and has an outstanding track record for delivering national, consumer-focused campaigns, which secure widespread engagement. They also cover strategic consultancy, crisis and corporate communications, public affairs and stakeholder relations. Luther has a long track record in the arts but their experience spans a diverse variety of sectors. Their clients range from large multinationals, through to government departments, national awareness-raising campaigns and all other kinds of public and third sector organisations.

An account of the legal responses to “natural” (open air funeral pyres) cremation since the advent of “modern” (in crematoria) cremation, concentrating particularly on the arguments, judgement and implications of the litigation resulting from the refusal of Newcastle City Council to make land available to the Anglo-Asian Friendship Society for pyres.

Stephen is a freelance lecturer, tutor and writer, a frequent contributor to professional publications and has a keen interest in criminal and medical law and cremation related matters. His past positions include Senior Lecturer, Cardiff Law School; Visiting Lecturer, Faculty of Law, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; Research Fellow, Department of Law, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University of Canberra. He is currently a part-time Research Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University and Visiting Lecturer at Cardiff Law School.

This presentation will portray a new and challenging world; a world with no history of cremation and a negative prejudice to it. It will also expose a new and surprising web application.

Alon was born in Israel in 1963. He established Aley Shalechet (Autumn Leaves) Ltd in 2004. Since then, as co-owner, he was also appointed as the Chief Executive Officer. He is a former hi-tech entrepreneur, most of his career and experience being built in this field.

Chairman: Harvey Thomas CBE
Isabel Mattick - Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities
Philip Blatchly - National Association of Funeral Directors
Kenneth Satterly - British Institute of Funeral Directors
Douglas Swan - National Association of Memorial Masons