Local Plans (Burial Space) Bill [HL]

Second Reading

13:34:00

Moved by

Lord Mohammed of TinsleyThat the Bill be read a second time.

Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)My Lords, we often hear that death is one of the few certainties in life, yet the question of where people may be laid to rest is all too often treated as an afterthought in our planning system. This Bill seeks to address that omission through a simple but important principle: every community should plan responsibly for the burial needs of its population.

At present, local authorities have powers to provide cemeteries, but they are under no statutory duty to ensure that sufficient burial space exists. In many areas, burial provision depends on a patchwork of local authority cemeteries, faith organisations and private providers, with no strategic assessment of long-term demand. The result is that, in some parts of England, burial capacity is becoming increasingly constrained, placing pressure on bereaved families and on the communities they serve.

The Bill does not seek to dictate where burial grounds should be located; nor does it impose unrealistic obligations on local authorities. Instead, it asks local planning authorities to do what they already do for housing, schools, transport and green infrastructure: assess future need, incorporate that assessment into their local plans, and publish a long-term strategy for meeting any shortfall in burial capacity. Planning is about looking ahead. We routinely plan decades into the future for homes, employment, land and public services. It seems only right that we should also plan for the final resting places that communities will inevitably require. The urgency of this matter was recognised independently by the Law Commission in its comprehensive review of burial and cremation law. The commission concluded that England and Wales face growing pressures on burial capacity, particularly in urban areas. It described the existing legal framework as “fragmented and outdated”. It observed that many burial authorities are approaching capacity and that, outside London, councils generally have no powers to reuse old graves as a means of managing demand.

We can already see the consequences. Councils including Birmingham, Leicester, Slough and Luton, as well as several London boroughs, have all warned of diminishing burial capacity. I have seen at first hand the situation in Birmingham, Dewsbury and Kirklees, as well as in my home city of Sheffield. Although national surveys have found that around one in four local authorities has 10 years or less of burial space remaining, around one in six has less than five.

This issue has been particularly significant for many faith communities. For Muslims and Jews, for example, burial is a religious obligation, and cremation is not an acceptable alternative. Many Christian denominations also continue to place great importance on burial. Although the Bill has obvious benefits for those faith communities, it is not a sectarian measure. It is about ensuring that every family, whatever its belief or tradition, has access to a dignified burial within a reasonable distance of its community. Without forward planning, families may increasingly find themselves having to arrange burial many miles from where their loved ones lived, worked and worshipped. That creates unnecessary emotional distress at a time when people are already coping with bereavement.

The Bill also supports better land use planning. By requiring burial needs to be considered as part of a local planning process, it enables authorities to identify suitable land well in advance, rather than responding to shortages through emergency or piecemeal decisions. Early planning allows burial provisions to be balanced alongside competing demands for housing, environmental protection and other essential infrastructure.

Some may question whether these plans will place an additional burden on local authorities, and I recognise those concerns. However, the duties proposed are proportionate and aligned with existing planning processes. The Bill will not require every authority to provide a cemetery; rather, it will require authorities to understand local need, assess existing capacity and explain how any future demand will be met. Those are reasonable expectations for any effective planning system.

Others may argue that changing burial practices or increased cremation rates will reduce demand. While those trends are relevant, they are far from universal. Significant sections of our population continue to require burials, and demographic growth in many areas means that demand is likely to continue for decades. Ignoring the issue today will simply pass a greater problem to future generations.

This is a modest Bill but it addresses a genuine gap in our planning framework. It promotes foresight, rather than crisis management; supports local decision-making, rather than centralised prescription; and helps ensure that communities can continue to meet one of humanity’s oldest and most fundamental needs with dignity and respect. I hope that, whatever our views on planning policies are more broadly, noble Lords will agree that preparing responsibly for the future is one of the core purposes of local government. The Bill will help ensure that burial provision is no longer overlooked in that process. I therefore commend the Bill to the House. I beg to move.

13:41:00

Viscount Stansgate (Lab)My Lords, tomorrow, we will commemorate 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, which established the United States as a republic—it is still, as far as I am aware, supposed to be a republic. I mention that because one of its founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, as the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, alluded to, was famous for having said that there are only two things in life that are certain: death and taxes. This is a Bill about death, or more particularly about where our dead bodies are put to rest.

Throughout human history, the way we deal with our dead bodies has a great deal to say about our humanity. I read recently that there is now archaeological evidence that the Neanderthals had burial practices, and of course we know a great deal about civilizations such as the Egyptians and the Chinese. More recently, HS2 unearthed a great deal of knowledge about the way in which people were buried in the 17th century, when the line was built through central London.

This is a Bill that the House should very much take seriously, even if it is not everybody’s cup of tea. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, for sponsoring the Bill. He was kind enough to draw it to my attention, for which I thank him, and he adroitly made his case for the Bill today. I congratulated him on having been successful in the lottery for Private Members’ Bills. As someone who has myself piloted a Private Member’s Bill through on to the statute book, I wish him every success.

If you read the Bill carefully, you will find several references to the cultural practices of communities. I will return to this aspect later, because the Bill tackles issues of growing concern to people of all communities. Reference has already been made to the recent Law Commission report of March this year on burial and cremation, which concluded not only that the last serious survey of burial spaces is already 20 years old and out of date but that the burial space in Church of England and local authority burial grounds might run out within the coming decades. I rather regret the fact that the Bishops’ Bench is not contributing to today’s debate.

It may be a short debate, and I am sure we will hear some very interesting speeches, but before I say a bit more about the Bill itself, I hope the House will allow me to make a few general comments, because the Bill is best approached with some understanding of the recent history of burial in this country.

Suppose we were holding this debate 200 years ago today. What would it be about? There was widespread concern about body-snatching. It is 200 years since the great private cemeteries of London were being planned: Kensal Green, Nunhead, West Norwood, Highgate and so on. They were built by joint-stock companies, and their whole design was about security. It is no coincidence that they were built with high walls and imposing gates, because the whole point of them was to provide the emerging middle class with a safe and secure burial environment. Planned in the 1820s—literally 200 years ago now—and built in the 1830s, they were known as the “magnificent seven”. Incidentally, they no longer felt obliged to bury in the Christian east-west orientation of sunrise to sunset; they could be planned according to a more elaborate layout, hence you see the beautiful cemeteries that we have today.

Of course, on the whole, the aristocracy had provision for their burials in their own vaults and lands, but the poorest in society, by contrast, were most vulnerable to body-snatching, which was a very successful business that fulfilled a need for medical colleges as well as providing a lucrative living for the body snatchers. People were murdered for body-snatching and their bodies were sold to the anatomy schools. In the infamous case of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh, they murdered 16 people in the 1820s. That provided the impetus for Parliament to pass the Anatomy Act 1832. The murders raised public awareness of the need for bodies for medical research and contributed to the passing of the Act. Intervening in that way, Parliament sought to deal with the body-snatching problem.

Incidentally, that Bill made its way through Parliament at the same time as the Great Reform Bill. It was known as the “midnight Bill”, because it passed late at night when people were not as interested. The main business of Parliament, carried on during the day, became the Great Reform Act 1832, which most of us learn about in history at school. The Anatomy Act provided sufficient bodies for medical schools, and the pauper institutions were used as a means of furnishing the dead bodies required for them. Basically, if you qualified for a pauper funeral, you certainly qualified for dissection.

Other developments in the 19th century included the creation of Brookwood Cemetery. Some Members may know it. It was designed to deal with the rapidly expanding population of London. A special train service was set up, which ran from London Necropolis station in Waterloo and transported the bodies down to the cemetery near Woking. Bombing in the Second World War blew up the station; otherwise, you would still be able to see it today.

Cremation, as a means of dealing with death, started to appear only in the 1890s and began to take off after the Great War—perhaps, and this is only a guess, because the colossal death toll of that war and a natural fear of decomposition changed people in the Christian community’s perceptions of burial.

But the fact is that the growing trend towards cremation in the Christian community did not erode the pressures on burial space. Over the decades, churches and local authorities have had to make increasing provision for burial space. By the way, there is quite a market in burial spaces. One colleague in this House told me a couple of days ago that the going price for a space in his particular hoped-for cemetery is £24,000. That is not inconsiderable. Perhaps this is a good moment to declare that a few years ago I was part of an Opposed Private Bill Committee. There are not many of them; they are something of a specialism. I am not sure whether many Members here have ever had experience of one, but I am glad to say that we have some clerks in this House who are great specialists. It was a Bill promoted by Bishop’s Stortford Town Council—known, I am sure, to my noble friend the Minister—which sought permission to reuse burial space in its cemetery because space was running out. Proposals such as these can arouse great emotion and depth of feeling. The proceedings were quasi-judicial and eventually the House granted permission for the proposal to proceed. I believe it was the first such Bill to succeed outside London.

The point I am making is that the pressure for increased burial space is growing, and the issues we are discussing today, whether or not this particular Bill succeeds, will not be going away, so we may as well tackle the underlying issues head on. No London borough could possibly afford burial space within its boundaries at the moment. It may be that my noble friend the Minister will agree that there is a real issue here and tell the House that it must be addressed but that perhaps this Bill is not the vehicle to do it. But the Bill seeks to meet those needs in the context of local authority planning, and we should closely debate what effects this may have up and down the country when we reach Committee.

Before we reach the Minister’s speech, I return to the phrase

“all faith and cultural communities”,

which appears in the Bill. Different communities have different burial traditions. For example, as has been mentioned, Jewish and Muslim communities have a strong preference for burial as soon as possible. That is hardly surprising as those religions originated in the Middle East when a quick burial was a health necessity. It is fair to observe that both communities still broadly prefer burial to cremation, although that is a generalisation, but some communities prefer an individual grave and dislike multiple graves, and people are entitled to have their own views. The effect of changing times on our many and varied communities is producing an explicit demand for more burial space.

I have run out of time. I need hardly add that I am very much looking forward to hearing what my noble friend the Minister has to say and, whatever approach the Government take to the Bill, to taking part in further proceedings on it.

13:50:00

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, on coming so high in the ballot; I hope his luck continues in his dealings with the Government on the Bill. I am one of those who support his efforts. I, too, would have welcomed the presence of some bishops today, given the nature of the subject. The Church of England probably has the majority of the acreage of burial ground around the country.

My interest in this comes from the fact that I am in my 80s and, in a sense, I am in the waiting room. I have long expressed a desire to be buried in the churchyard of St Paul’s Church in Alverthorpe, in Yorkshire. It is the parish of my birth and family roots, but space is limited there. With the help of my friend, Phillip Collins, who has used genealogy, WikiTree and AI, we have managed to trace a whole range of my forebears there. We think that some of the graves in which they are buried are not full. So there is an opportunity—a green opportunity, I would say—for me to be buried in one of those graves.

I would like to add to the suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, that we should have an extra section at the end about the full use of existing cemeteries around the country. There are acres and acres of them. Given that we now have AI and other methods of genealogy, we can make a connection between graves and ancestors. Given what my noble friend Lord Stansgate has just said about someone being willing to pay £24,000 to find a burial ground, this is perhaps an amazing opportunity—certainly for the Church of England, and maybe the Roman Catholic Church and other faiths—to explore this and make a connection with individuals who would wish to be buried there if there is an opportunity to link with their forebears. They would probably be willing to pay for it.

Where have we got to? I wrote to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds and he has given me some assistance. I asked him to raise this issue with the Church of England—I think it may have been buried somewhere. So I raised it myself with Marsha de Cordova, who is my MP in Wandsworth. She is also one of the Church Commissioners, and she had an open meeting for the Church of England for anyone to raise questions. I raised it there, and there seemed to be little disposition towards giving support. One response was, “This is all about money”. Of course, the Church of England is badly in need of money for the upkeep of its churches, and so is the Roman Catholic Church. I think I have stumbled on a business opportunity for churches of all faiths. We should be exploring the link between technology, the new way of exploring our genealogy, and linking up with people who may have an interest in finding a burial spot, given that there is such pressure on finding appropriate places. In addition, we will need new space. I support the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, all the way with that.

I am wondering if my noble friend the Minister, who is at the end of a tiring week and does not want too much trouble from me, would be willing to explore this. I am not sure how we take this further forward. I have spoken to the Public Bill Office, which said that after we have had the debate and have seen how the Minister responds, we can then see whether we can table additional amendments—maybe a new clause about utilisation of existing burial grounds to their maximum extent. We could look at whether there is an opportunity there, as a green policy, particularly for those who own the churchyards, to raise additional money for the upkeep of their churches or the benefit of their local communities.

I am not causing trouble. It is an interesting area that I do not think has been explored. There are great opportunities; there are acres and acres of burial grounds around the country. That is all valuable land, and it has not been fully utilised. Before we start worrying, we need to extend but we can probably minimise the encroachment into other land if we use what we already have. I hope the Minister will give me a pointer on the direction I should go in, and I will then talk to the Public Bill Office and come back with some appropriate amendments, which I hope she might find acceptable.

13:55:00

Lord Jamieson (Con)My Lords, I am also very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, for bringing forward this Bill, and for the clarity of its purpose, which he spoke about.

This is a thoughtful and timely proposal for addressing an issue that other noble Lords have raised, which is clearly important. I declare my interest as a councillor in central Bedfordshire. Not unsurprisingly, space in cemeteries is a key issue. In one of my villages, Westoning, there are six spaces left in a village of around 2,000 souls. The noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, said that he is in the waiting room; we are all in the waiting room—some of us just wish to wait a little bit longer than maybe he does. That point is very pertinent for some of my residents, who are very conscious that they want to be buried in their local village. For the 17 years I have been there, I have been helping them try to find a site, but it is not necessarily easy. You would have thought that in a village in the middle of the green belt there would be space, but when you take account of land ownership and in my area the risk of flooding in particular—obviously, you have to have a water table well below the depth at which you bury people—it is not simple. However, it is very important, and I recognise that.

Responsibility for burial provision rests primarily with local authorities. I am not quite sure of the case in London but, in many rural areas, the actual delivery is done by parish councils, religious bodies and churches. With the pressures due to land use, demographic change and different faith and cultural communities, the current framework is frankly increasingly stretched. The Law Commission’s ongoing review of the death management system has highlighted the complexity of existing arrangements and the need for a more coherent and long-term view.

I also want to highlight what the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, raised. As he said, in the 17th and 18th centuries, this was a commercial opportunity. He mentioned the seven major cemeteries in London, one of which is Highgate Cemetery, which I had the pleasure of visiting about a year ago. That was set up as a private enterprise and made a lot of money, until it went bust. Running cemeteries is a long-term business. They are costly to set up and there are ongoing costs for a long period of time.

The noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, mentioned the price of £24,000. For many people, that is way out of reach. I would not like to go back to the 17th-century provision where the nobility can have themselves buried nicely and the paupers cannot. It is very important that we look at this in the round. I take his suggestion that maybe we should look at extending the Bill to look at how we can reuse existing facilities, bearing in mind that that would also raise the whole issue of the ownership of those facilities. We recognise the challenges and the sensitivities, but ensuring that all communities have access to dignified, appropriate burial space is a basic matter of respect. The Bill’s emphasis on consultation with faith groups, burial authorities and neighbouring councils is very welcome. We also note the context of the Law Commission’s work on grave reuse. Although the Government have yet to publish their full response, the commission’s proposals on strengthening safeguards, extending powers beyond London and protecting war graves demonstrate the scale of reform that may be required in the years ahead. The Bill does not pre-empt that work but provides a practical interim framework for local planning.

There will clearly be questions in Committee. One that I will focus on is the resource implications. As I mentioned, it is not just about the cost of setting up a cemetery but of looking after it for not five, 10 or 20 years but potentially over 100. That cumulative cost is significant, and many local authorities are severely stretched. I appreciate that the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, implied that it would not necessarily be a burden on local councils but, as I understand it, as the Bill is written ultimately they are the backstop—if you are the backstop for anything, you need to make sure that you can afford it.

Given the stretched finances of local government, particularly after some recent cuts for some councils, what is the Government’s position on new burdens? This will be a new burden for local councils. Also, we need to look at the interaction between existing planning duties, the balance between local discretion and national prescription and the responsibilities for existing sites and how they will be managed. However, the principle that burial space should be planned for transparently, consistently and with due regard to community need is one that we support. I look forward to hearing contributions from across the House as we move forward on this Bill. The Opposition will not oppose the Bill and we welcome the opportunity to scrutinise it further.

14:00:00

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab): My Lords, I will resist the temptation to talk about last thing on a Friday being the graveyard slot. This is a very serious topic. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, for tabling this Private Member’s Bill and for giving me the opportunity to meet with him yesterday to talk through what he wanted to do and the principles around the Bill. I also thank my noble friends Lord Stansgate and Lord Brooke for speaking to me in advance of the Bill coming before the House.

I start with a phrase that the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, usedthat every family should have access to a dignified burial close to their community. That was a very important phrase to someone who has been involved with local government for as many years as I have, and I know he has. It is very important that we keep our focus on that. I recognise the importance of the provision of burial space. I have some reservations around the necessity for the Bill, which I will come to in a moment. The Bill as proposed would require local planning authorities to include suitable provision for burial space in their local plans and put that on the statute book as a separate issue to other issues that come forward for planning. The National Planning Policy Framework sets out the policy expectations for what should be considered in the development of the plan, including local plans and in decision-making. The framework for what should be considered is set through policy and not statute, to offer the necessary flexibility to local planning authorities across the country to consider their local area and the specific needs of the local population.

It is a matter for local authorities to allocate local resources in line with their priorities, and this includes burial provision. In areas where this is an issue, such as London or Cambridge, many local authorities already include specific policies on burial grounds in their local plans. We want to ensure that local planning authorities can do this where there is a concern, but are not required to allocate where there is not an issue in their local area. The current NPPF includes policies to ensure that there is provision for community facilities and public service infrastructure in local areas.

The current version of the NPPF does not directly reference burial spaces. However, it sets out that strategic policies should set out an overall strategy for the pattern, scale and design quality of places that make sufficient provision for community facilities such as health, education and cultural infrastructure. It also allows for the provision of burial space on green-belt land. That might respond to one of the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, about treating that kind of development differently.

We consulted on an updated National Planning Policy Framework between September 2025 and March 2026. The draft NPPF is clear that development plans should promote the creation of healthy and inclusive places and the provision, retention and enhancement of appropriate community facilities and public service infrastructure. It is up to a local authority to determine the local need for those facilities, which could include burial grounds, as many local authorities have already done.

The proposed NPPF also offers protections for existing burial grounds through setting out that the presumption in favour of sustainable development is unlikely to apply in situations which would involve the whole or partial loss of undeveloped land which is used for a cemetery or burial ground. Furthermore, the draft NPPF sets out that burial grounds are a form of development where there are benefits to approval outside settlements and that they are not inappropriate in the green belt. We received over 20,000 responses to the consultation, including a small number on this specific issue. We are currently analysing all those responses and intend to publish our response with the new NPPF in the summer.

The Law Commission’s recent report was mentioned by a number of noble Lords. We are acutely aware of concerns around burial space, which were considered in that report. While the report did not call for statutory burial provision, as the Bill does, it did address a number of issues, such as burial ground management and records, which my colleagues in the Ministry of Justice are leading on. We will publish a government response to the Law Commission report in due course, and I look forward to working with MoJ colleagues and local government as we take these important issues forward.

Turning to some of the specific points raised by noble Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Stansgate for taking us through the history of burial and how it works. I found the HS2 excavations and some of the information that they have thrown up really fascinating. We have had our own example of that in Stevenage, where Roman remains were found when we were excavating sites. It is fascinating. Both he and my noble friend Lord Brooke mentioned the fact that the Bishops are not present today; I am sure that they will have their own views and that they will get involved in the Bill at a later stage. When my noble Lord Stansgate referred to the “midnight Bill” as the Anatomy Act 1832, it put me in mind of a much more up-to-date version, which was the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which saw us here at four o’clock in the morning—that practice was not limited to the 19th century. Of course, I am also aware of the issues around Bishop’s Stortford in the Bill that came through this House that he mentioned.

My noble friend Lord Brooke spoke about being in the waiting room. I hope he has as long a wait in that waiting room as we would all want him to have: we want to see him here long into the future. Both he and my noble friend Lord Stansgate mentioned the Church of England. Of course, burial on land consecrated by the Church of England is governed by the faculty jurisdiction and is a matter for the Church, and I am sure my noble friend Lord Brooke will continue his dialogue with the Church of England on that.

On the point that my noble friend Lord Brooke made about green policy, I want to highlight the very good practice we are seeing in some areas of providing for green burial grounds, which is very creditable. I pay tribute to my colleagues in local government for their action in this respect. I think that has been a really great development in recent times.

The noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, asked what the Government are currently doing on the provision of burial space. We are aware of increasing local pressure on burial spaces in some parts of the country. He will know that we do not have day-to-day operational responsibility for burial grounds, which are managed locally, and that there is no statutory duty on local authorities to make that provision. It is a matter for each local authority to allocate local resources, but the Law Commission’s recent report means that we are very keen to engage with stakeholders, including local authority representatives, to understand how, in the context of responding to the commission’s recommendations, we can best facilitate local provision and management of burial capacity going forward. Certainly, it is my intention to do that.

I have already spoken about the Law Commission recommendations. There is, of course, a very close connection between the work streams that the Law Commission has under way on this, and we will consider the most practical approach to publishing our response, including the timing. The noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, mentioned the specific requirements for different communities in terms of burial practices, as did my noble friend Lord Stansgate. Measures have been taken in recent years to update crematoria, in particular, so that they better reflect and understand the needs of different cultures and faiths. It is for local authorities to deal with this because they can decide what their priorities are, depending on the groups they represent locally. We are keen to engage closely with representatives from faith communities on all issues in relation to death management, particularly when we work on that response to the Law Commission’s report.

The noble Lords, Lord Mohammed and Lord Jamieson, referred to the issue of funding for this. As I think was mentioned, it is a very long forward commitment. I think the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, was talking about Highgate cemetery. These are of course long-term commitments that have to be made by local authorities, so, if the Government were to support this Bill, we would consider relevant impacts, such as those set out in the new burdens doctrine. I hope that responds to those questions.

It is of course appropriate for these matters to be addressed in local plans rather than legislation, so that local planning authorities retain the flexibility to respond to the particular circumstances of their areas and needs, which may of course include the specific needs of their diverse communities and local population. This is a timely intervention because of the progress of the National Planning Policy Framework, so I am incredibly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, for prompting me, as we go through the stages of publishing the next version of the policy framework, to look in particular at this issue. We will respond to the recent consultation in due course and of course we will keep the matter under review, in the light of all the consultation responses we have had and the contributions in the House today. I am most grateful to the noble Lord.

14:11:00

Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)My Lords, I thank everyone for their constructive comments. During the debate, my phone has been quite busy, particularly on the question of the attendance or not of the Lords spiritual. I have actually had a message from them, which I would like to share with your Lordships’ House. It says, “We apologise for this because it is ordination season and the majority of Lords spiritual are in their dioceses or ordaining new clergy. However, this does not reflect their lack of interest; actually they are very supportive of the Bill itself and welcome an opportunity to discuss taking it forward”.

Similarly, my colleagues at the South Yorkshire Muslim Burial Trust are watching, as are many others. Clearly, as we have heard, this issue goes across communities and faiths and, as we also heard, this Bill is serious. We have talked about all being in the waiting room. The fact is that we hope many of us will still be there to make sure that we see the change that this Bill requires.

Clearly, there may be disagreement between us on how we get to the destination, but it is clear from the debate, whether from the comments of the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, the noble Lords, Lord Brooke and Lord Jamieson, or the Minister, that we have all acknowledged there is an issue. There is a problem: how do we deal with it? As I said, it was the luck of the draw: I put my faith in that lottery and my name came out with this Bill. I know that other noble Lords, particularly the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, have talked about this issue in the past, and I look forward to getting into further debate in Committee.

During the debate, we heard £24,000 being charged for a burial plot. It is a huge issue, as that is way beyond the means of most average residents, and we have got to look at the supply side. Clearly, there are opportunities here: as I said in my speech, if we are planning for homes, businesses, schools et cetera, thought has to be given to how we deal with burials now. It is better if we do it by long-term planning rather than knee-jerk reactions when trying to find space. Clearly, this challenges London, as there are clearly land issues here. That is why I said that not every local authority has to have its own provisions. It is about asking how we deal with the need that is there.

As we heard from one of our contributors, death and taxes are a given in life and I really welcome the opportunity to present this Bill to your Lordships’ House.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

House adjourned at 2.14 pm.