Decision details

That an s101 agreement is drawn up and agreed so that the council’s Bereavement Services within Customer Services manages the Fulford Cemetery and its staff for a period of one year. All other legal agreements will stay in place until a further options paper is approved for Executive to consider.

In December 2024, Fulford Parish Council made a formal request for CYC to take over the management and maintenance of Fulford Cemetery, alongside rescinding the 2006 Burial Agreement. This paper recommends a one year management only arrangement which will allow a period of stability, improve capacity at the cemetery alongside providing time for due diligence work to take place on longer term arrangements.

Full details are contained in the attached detailed report.

• Option 1 – Do nothing and CYC continue to advise only. At this point CYC could decide to take the annual loss and hope that Fulford Cemetery returns to a profitable position once again. However, the cemetery does not have sufficient or skilled management resources or time to dedicate to making the necessary improvements to reduce the losses, and the Council cannot directly influence the Parish Council decisions on the operations of the Cemetery. This option is not recommended due to the high financial risk.

• Option 2 - CYC could choose to end the current Burial Agreement. The reputational risk of this option is high given that Fulford Cemetery is the burial ground used for York residents. The Parish Council are not likely to agree without an arrangement to manage the Cemetery. This option is not recommended as it would almost certainly bankrupt the Parish Council. This option cannot be considered in this report as this would be a ‘key decision’ for Executive not officers.

• Option 3 – A management arrangement. This option would see CYC provide management support to the Cemetery and run it on the Parish Council’s behalf, with the employment cost of existing staff and ownership of assets being retained by the Parish Council. The benefits of this action are that the Parish Council will remain the employer of the cemetery staff and should the business be turned around there will be no pressure on CYC to cover losses. This is the least worst preferred option of the three although there are necessary costs which are unavoidable to inject the required resources into the Cemetery operations to safeguard them.

Option 1 and Option 2 above