Cemeteries and Crematoria Bylaw review

Aramoho cemetery

The council is comprehensively reviewing its Cemeteries and Crematoria Bylaw – which is due for review – and associated policies and guidelines. These set out the council’s rules for and approach to cemeteries, burials, cremations and monuments within the district.  

Submissions closed on Sunday 16 April, 2023. 

Cemeteries are important spaces for the community. They’re places people go to find peace and quiet, to mourn and remember friends and family members. They can represent both how we respect and commemorate the past, and how we interact with and relate to it.

This bylaw and the associated rules ensure that human remains are laid to rest appropriately, and that land and structures in cemeteries are protected. It is an important tool in protecting the environmental health of the district, as well as making sure the community has a peaceful space they can hold funerals and respectfully mourn.

The proposal is now available to read, and submissions closed on Sunday 16 April, 2023. Anybody who wants to present their submission in person is welcome at the public hearing, which we expect to be in late April or early May.

Read the proposal here(PDF, 208KB)

How the proposal was developed

What this bylaw signifies is important to many groups from within the community, which is why an advisory panel was set up to support the review and an online survey was used to seek feedback from the general public.

The panel consisted of representatives from key community groups, including Tangata Whenua, the Hindu and Christian communities, the New Zealand Remembrance Army, natural burial advocates and funeral directors.

The advisory panel raised issues that were important to their respective communities. The panel decided on five areas to prioritise, which form the basis of the proposal. These are:

1. Environmental sustainability
2. Inclusivity and accessibility
3. Safety
4. General comfort and usability
5. Respecting and honouring our past.

In turn these categories had specific measures and actions identified. You can read more about these categories at the bottom of this page.  

The current bylaw

Cemeteries are currently managed through the Cemeteries and Crematoria Bylaw 2016, the Cemetery Monument Policy 2016, the Natural Burials and Conditions 2013, and the Cultural Guidelines for the Burial of Koiwi/Human Remains at Aramoho Cemetery, Whanganui 2016.

The current Bylaw sets out regulations for the operation of public, council-owned and administered cemeteries and crematoria in the district. Its main purposes are to ensure that human remains are interred in an appropriate manner and that land and physical structures in cemeteries are protected.

The health and safety of the public, visitors and workers is an underlying concern, as is ensuring that processes and practices that take place in the cemeteries are safe for all.

Read the current bylaw

The council needs to revise this bylaw before it expires in August 2023. The Ministry of Health is conducting a comprehensive review of the Burials and Cremations Act 1964, which the current bylaw was created under, and the ministry expects the general policy approach to be publicly available soon. While we have limited guidance on what this will look like, we have drafted the bylaw in a way that will allow it to be enduring to any proposed legal changes. 

Principles and Issues

The council took a ground-up approach for this review, looking not just at what was working and what could be improved from our existing controls, but also at what principles should guide the way we manage our cemeteries and our plaques and memorials in the district. The advisory group identified priority principles, and then identified issues underneath the priority principles. 

In addition to the five principles, four priority issues were raised through this process as areas that required action.

Cemeteries are places where people go to have quiet and solitude. They are also areas that steadily expand over time, and where later intervention can be extremely difficult, with headstones and burial sites expected to be left alone in almost all circumstances. Considering the current and future impacts on climate change, it is important that our cemeteries are environmentally friendly by design. In some cases, such as in natural burials, ensuring minimal environmental impact is specifically a part of the burial practice. 

 

Cemeteries can be important places for any and all members of the community, whether it’s to remember people or stories, or just for quiet and privacy. In order to serve these needs, they have to be open and welcoming to all of Whanganui’s citizens. This means both being inclusive to people of all faiths, cultures, and identities, and also being physically accessible and navigable to people of all abilities. 

 

Cemeteries and crematoria in the district need to be safe for visitors. People are not ‘on guard’ when visiting or attending an event in a cemetery, which means safety incidents can have more of an impact on victims. Safety incidents can occur in many ways, such as broken glass or pottery lying in the grass, or when people act in disruptive or aggressive ways, or drive unsafely.

 

As well as inclusivity and accessibility, comfort and general usability are important to make sure that the largest section of the community can get use out of our spaces. A lack of benches, rough and irregular paving, and poor signage and direction can all impact how comfortable of an experience using our cemeteries is.

 

Cemeteries are one of the primary ways our community remembers our past, both the people and the events that significantly impact us. Cemeteries need to be designed, built, maintained, and managed in a way that makes this possible, both for visitors and for people organising funerals or other events.

 

Many community members have made us aware of the fact that there is no dedicated space in our district for scattering ashes into water after somebody has been cremated. The only current option – using natural water sources like the Awa – has significant cultural barriers against introducing any part of a dead body. Our proposed solution to this is to implement a water feature specifically for this purpose, which would serve the needs of our community as well as adding to the atmosphere of the cemetery.

 

Maintenance of graves can be complicated because it can only take place with the consent of the owner of the plot and it is often unclear who the owner is or how to get in contact with them, particularly with older graves. While there are volunteer groups who clean and maintain graves, the question of ownership can prevent them from doing so. We are recommending that this rule be modified to allow the council to authorise maintenance of a grave once reasonable attempts have been made to contact the owner. 

 

The council does not intend to manage how people grieve or memorialise, however consumption of alcohol can lead to disruptive behaviour, litter, and safety issues if glass bottles are left behind. In some cases, restricting consumption of alcohol is a reliable way of minimising the secondary issues that follow on from it. In this case, our recommendation is that we only regulate the secondary issues – the disruptive behaviour and waste – rather than consumption of alcohol itself.

 

Currently, the use of cemeteries within the district, both for burial proceedings and as public spaces, is done through a number of documents.

These documents have been developed on an as-needed basis without a coherent strategy guiding them, and as a result they often overlap, or don’t include areas that they should, and it can be difficult to find specific regulations. We are now proposing to restructure the documents.

This would involve:

  • a policy which creates the overall framework for our regulations,
  • a bylaw which prescribes enforcement provisions,
  •  and guidelines for each specific area.

The relevant documents would include: