A volunteer has been banned from cleaning graves because the council says it is not safe. The Telegraph has the story.
Ben McGregor, 25, washes the headstones at Hebburn Cemetery, South Tyneside, with only soap, water and a bristle brush.
He lost both his father and his best friend to suicide and, after struggling with his own mental health, said that “if I am helping others, it helps me”.
However, the Labour-led council claims it would be “inappropriate” for McGregor to continue his work because “safety checks have not taken place”.
He has been praised by families for his transformations of the headstones, but said the council had threatened him with legal action if he did not stop.
McGregor said: “The one that stands out to me is a woman who was suffering from cancer. She was crying on the phone, saying that’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. The council’s response has blown my mind. It’s doing my head in”.
He claimed he was first contacted by South Tyneside council by phone the day after he had created a Facebook page advertising his volunteering.
After he continued with the cleaning, he then received a second call, saying he was told: “You need to stop now.” He added: “They say I need a health and safety certificate – but this is health and safety gone mad.”
McGregor said he began the cleaning process by carefully inspecting the gravestones, stopping if the memorials showed any sign of structural instability.
So far, he has cleaned more than 20 graves, and said he did not intend to stop despite the council’s request because of the gratitude expressed by those he has helped.
A spokesman for South Tyneside council said: “We greatly value the work of volunteers who help care for our cemeteries and work closely with several established Friends of Cemetery groups across the borough.
“A borough‑wide memorial inspection programme is currently under way, and not all cemeteries have yet been inspected. It would be inappropriate to allow the general cleaning of memorials in areas where safety checks have not taken place, and as a precaution all voluntary groups were asked to pause memorial‑related work in those locations.
“In this particular case, an individual was asked to pause activity temporarily while standard checks are carried out around safety, risk assessments, insurance and liability.
Worth reading in full.
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In the same bureaucratic maze.
When my mother died, my elder brother contacted the council to arrange for her to be buried in the plot in the local cemetery she had bought years earlier.
Not possible because, and I quote, “The plot belonged to mother not him, so he had no legal right to use it without her consent”. Explaining she was dead so consent would not be forthcoming, did not help.
But – he could fill out a form and apply to have ownership transferred from my mother to him. That will be £185 please – the real reason I would say.
As the council mentioned the groups that maintain headstones and other things around the graveyards. I wonder if he got dobbed in by one of them as he’s encroaching on their ‘right’ to be seen as good and virtuous. Perhaps he could just join one of the groups?
Then they should sort out his certificate.
Which is worst the risk of ghosts in the graveyard or the goolies spouted by the council ?
Slightly off topic but I went to the local cemetery the other day. A bloke got up from behind a gravestone, so I said “Morning”
He replied “No, just having a shit”
© Bob Mortimer, Last One Laughing, Episode 6, 2025
I spent my working life in managing risk and a large part of the problem is that many people do not understand the concept. Risk is the product of probability and consequence so even if the consequence is high, if the probability is miniscule, the risk is low and risk can always be mitigated – you cannot fully eliminate it unless, as these people seem to think, you don’t do anything at all.
Are the council referring to the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974? I thought that covered situations in the workplace, ie people who are employed. As this caring man isn’t an employee is the health and safety requirement relevant in this case?
I am always in mind of the attached picture these days, although I really should care and take action, I can understand this man’s frustration.
Some years ago I was in our local cemetery visiting my grandparents grave. The head stone is about 4 feet wide and only two feet high. It had a ribbon around it as if it were unstable. I pushed against it and it didn’t move so the ribbon was ridiculous. A council worker came over and explained that if I fell against the headstone it would fall over on me and the council could be sued. I explained as politely as I could that if I were to fall against it, it would fall away from me and as it is only 2 feet high I would have to do a double somerseault over it in a split second to get on the other side before it hit the ground. And as it is only 2 feet high it would hardly squash the grass. The worker said that he had used a pushometer (yes, it was new to me) and it had moved so it was unsafe. I asked him to use it while I was there and he was nearly red in the face trying to move it. I had proved my point and the ribbon was removed. Perhaps… Read more »
I’m not sure I can think of any activity less dangerous than cleaning the headstone of a grave.
Just a bunch of cretins who need to justify their jobs by inventing a problem that doesn’t exist.
It is for precisely the same reason, that it is deemed by the health and safety clowns that security guards are no longer allowed to do their job and halt shoplifters in their tracks.
How about health and safety checks / risk assessments on undocumented, dangerous migrants who have a criminal record?
Landing jumbo jets is very dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. The same applies to the cleaning of headstones and, for example, the hanging of wet socks on the washing line in bright sunshine.
This arrogant young fellow hasn’t acquired his HCD (Headstone Cleaning Diploma).
😆
When I went to renew the flowers at the base of my grandmother’s grave last year… silly me, I forgot to do a thorough risk assessment and upgrade my liability insurance with Churchill!
You might disturb whatever horror got buried there and end up being eaten by it. Or something like that.
‘Ere! Don’t talk about my Dad like that!
“The tombstone fell on him
And squish-squash, he died.”
Non-PC song from my childhood. It starts with him smoking a cigar and abusing a lady, and ends with him sizzling and frying in “the other place.” If only he had listened to the health warnings about smoking, the Me Too women, and most of all, the council’s Health and Safety instructions about graveyard dangers.
That brought back memories!
I found this lyric with an annoying warning at the top and a weird chorus which I don’t remember being in it at all.
D’oh! Here’s the link: https://www.boyscouttrail.com/content/song/she_sat_on_a_hillside-1377.asp
“Oom plucka-plucka”?
How weird is that? Everybody knows it should be “Goom pegga-pegg”.
A story that neatly encapsulates 21st century england.
That’s a very British problem which ultimately comes from the concept of duty of care. In Germany, authorities would just put up a sign stating Betreten auf eigene Gefahr (enter at own risk) and if someone would complain to them about some harm having befallen him while in the area, point at the sign and shrug their shoulders. In the UK, the authorities are responsible for the safety of ordinary people who are – by definition – not considered to be able to look after themselves and hence, tendencially, everything gets prohibited because that’s the only way to stop someone from sueing an authority because hot water actually came out of a tap labelled HOT WATER.
There are places that have warning signs at the entry to places in the UK still. A church graveyard that I occasionally visit has just such a sign. Not only that, as it is in Wales, the signage I’ve seen was in English only, in the graveyard of an Anglican Church in S. Wales.
Probably a relic from saner times.
Perhaps they should erect a sign at the cemetery gates reading, “Danger of death”.
🙂
Or maybe “Caribbean graveyard. Beware of zombies!”
Can I sue the motorway service station if the tap is labelled HOT WATER but the water is cold?
We had no health and safety checks before we encouraged mass migration.
No, no, no! That’s OUR job and we don’t want to do it. So if you do it, we shall either have to take over from you or it will make us look bad letting you continue to do it. So stop!
and if we do have to take over from you we’ll not be able to do such a good job, so stop!
And if you take over doing our jobs we’ll have even more difficulty hiding the fact that we do sod-all. Fortunately our managers won’t put up with that as it might reduce the size of their empires within the council so the council will sue.
If I wish to clean my mother’s grave (for free, as a volunteer), must I first take out insurance?
It depends on the conditions attached to the licence the council issues, I guess?
Hm. Thanks. Let me check. Don’t want to get arrested, do I.
“If he wants to clean graves he should blooming well WFH where it’s safe, just as we council workers must. Honestly, some people!”
Health & Safety Endangers Freedom
H&S is necessary but unfortunately some people use it to achieve their own agenda. They are more dangerous than the regulations.
Common sense is necessary.
The ultimate result of socialism is despair and ruin. It’s happened so many times in the past, but now the cumulative affects of these bouts of insanity is reaching terminal velocity.
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings, while the inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
Thatcher
Pathetic response from the council. More power to you, Ben 👏
The fascinating thing is that, although they apparently lack resources to get a quick health and safety check done to help the community, they will spend money to watch like hawks and pounce with the full force of the law should he continue to clean graves.
It’s almost as if councils are led by Little Hitlers… isn’t it.
That is a very astute observation. Probably the same for so called hate speech and other woke ideas. It really does expose their agenda of suppression and control. But if people keep electing the numbskulls then what is there to do apart from exposing them. Even then people will just keep voting for these cretins!
Exactly.
Resources are always available for certain things.
Shoplifting, burglary, phone theft – no resources, chronic staff shortages.
Anti-woke tweet – police knocks on your door.
Part of the problem is that when you elect sensible people their desire to change things is overridden by the council officers who are of course unelected but hold the legal power over how the council operates.
As usual, it’s the people who are really in charge who are the problem.
Absolutely, we used to just ‘do things’ but now everything is bound up with risk assessments, elf and safety etc. BUT they could do this if they wanted to, money galore for all sorts of other nonsense. You would have thought that for the sake of the bad publicity they would inevitably receive they would have sorted this, it wouldn’t have cost that much. However, the low IQ official reflexively said no. Shows you the mindset of how our petty bureaucrats operate at all levels of government.
There is nothing that says “be kind” quite like stopping someone from helping others.
In this case, it says: The guy cleaning the headstones could perhaps trip over a ½” high wall, twist his ankle and then sue us on no win no fee basis for a gazillion £ in damages and hence, he must be kept out of the graveyard until we’ve completed some COA routine or legal advisors consider necessary for us to avoid being blamed for this.
You are right. So even the public should be prohibited from entering the cemetery in case someone trips and gets injured.
But it does also question the idea of community involvement frequently heralded by socialists to encourage a so called community spirit. What they mean is that a community can only exist under their terms, anything that falls outside their own ill defined parameters would and always is deemed to be a risk to the community they pretend to represent. Their ideas are so contradictory that only a socialist ideology could be so stupid to enforce these ideas. Hence as said before, they are cretins, but perhaps useful cretins, to someone…. Probably the Fabians.
Bloody Jobsworth Local Council Snivelling Servants.
Not one milligram of common sense amongst the lot of them.
‘Elf & Safety, my ar*e.
‘Thats life’ program did a jobsworth section, perfect for this bunch of imbeciles!
What a lovely young man👍 bless you sir!
Yes.
How true.
Literally true – so let’s get rid of those pointless jobs then…