S4M-15608 Burial and Cremation (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

The Deputy Presiding Officer (Elaine Smith): The next item of business is a debate on motion S4M-15608, in the name of Maureen Watt, on the Burial and Cremation (Scotland) Bill.

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Stewart Stevenson (Banffshire and Buchan Coast) (SNP):

I congratulate Lesley Brennan on what I thought was a thoughtful and informative speech, to which I listened with interest. I enjoy having her sit with me on the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee, where she makes a significant contribution.

There are a number of things in the bill that are extremely interesting. I will start with the issue of the licensing of undertakers. My personal experience of undertakers is that they are people who, on the occasions on which I have had to engage their services, have behaved with absolute sensitivity and have done an absolutely excellent job. In one particular case, the circumstances were particularly delicate and difficult, and I thought that they did well.

Jenny Marra mentioned the Burial Grounds (Scotland) Act 1855. I think that all the provisions of that act are no longer current. I am not a legal eagle who is qualified to say that, but that is certainly what legislation.gov.uk says. However, it is not clear what has happened to many of the duties. It looks as though they have been supplanted and distributed across the legislative canon.

When the civil registration of births, marriages and deaths started in Scotland in 1855, and for quite some time after, the undertaker certified on the death certificate where the burial had taken place. Of course, that predated cremations so perhaps things were a little bit simpler then, but that means that some of the information about burials is available on the “Scotland’s People” website, which is run by the General Register Office for Scotland and provides information on births, marriages and deaths and other subjects that are of interest to genealogists and legal researchers. With that in mind, it strikes me that it might be a good idea for section 10 of the bill, on burial registers, to be constructed in such a way that local authorities would be able to use the General Register Office for Scotland as the publisher and custodian of the information on burial registers that the act will require to be prepared. A lot of the infrastructure is already there, and things could be arranged so that the requirement that people in the local area could still get free access could be met—I will not engage in the details on that.

However, I have a wee concern about publishing the details of where burials are, because the requirement does not appear to be time limited. There are some extremely old graveyards, and we might be creating a duty for some local authorities that it is almost impossible to deliver. Across from the back of the Parliament, we have the New Calton cemetery, which has been on the go for a couple of hundred years. Even the book of monumental inscriptions that the Scottish Genealogical Society has produced—it is a register only of gravestones, not who is buried where—runs to more than 100 pages of quite small print. I do not know what the state of the records on burials is, but I think that there are significant issues associated with that.

Sections 16 to 19 address private burials, which is good, but we must be careful to ensure that local authorities have a duty to act timeously in this area. I have personal experience of a friend who wanted a private burial. He knew that he was dying, but it took a year to arrange his private burial and he was clinging on at the end to ensure that he got it. That was partly down to SEPA rather than the local authority. There are genuine difficulties that I do not offer a solution to.

On section 12, the right to a lair is for someone resident in a council area. We might look at extending that slightly because I think that it is much more important to consider the person who died in that regard. The relatives might all live a long way away but might want to bury the deceased in the community in which they died, for the benefit of friends in that community. I think that there is a wee issue there.

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