Shrewsbury baby ashes inquiry calls for national inspector of crematoriums
Baby Ashes Report Calls for Inspector από wochit
A national inspector should be created for crematoriums after bereaved parents were unable to receive their babies’ ashes, an inquiry has concluded.
About 60 families are believed to have been affected by failures at Shrewsbury’s Emstrey crematorium between 1996 and 2012.
The Shropshire Council-commissioned report said poor training and out-of-date equipment were mainly to blame.
The council said it would be shocked if there were not similar cases.
David Jenkins, who led the independent inquiry, said he had been “struck by the absence of authoritative national guidance”.
‘Historic’ failures
He recommended the government appoint an independent inspector to oversee standards across England.
Keith Barrow, leader of Shropshire Council, said he “would be shocked if this wasn’t happening all over the country”.
Staff at Emstrey told the inquiry they were not aware babies’ ashes could be recovered from the cremators.
Some said training did not cover the possibility of manually overriding the equipment, which the manufacturer has said would have provided infant ashes.
The report said no ashes were handed over to parents of children under the age of one between 1996 and 2013.
Mr Jenkins said the practice seemed “to have been accepted locally as the norm”.
The inquiry in Shrewsbury followed an investigation by BBC Radio Shropshire, which prompted a campaign by local parents under the Action for Ashes banner.
It followed a similar investigation in Scotland after failures at the Mortonhall crematorium in Edinburgh.
A Freedom of Information inquiry by the BBC last year found the ashes of more than 1,000 babies were not handed to their parents between 2008 and 2013.
‘Felt like body snatching’
Shropshire Council said since new equipment was installed at the end of 2012, babies ashes had been recovered in all cases.
Old equipment meant the small quantity of ashes resulting from a baby’s cremation were lost in the system, as staff failed to manually override the cremators.
By 2009, staff told the inquiry the equipment was in “poor condition”, with only “basic” maintenance. The computer control system, meanwhile, was “archaic” and obsolete”.
Cooperative Funeral took over the running of the Emstrey site in 2011 and said its first priority was to replace the aging equipment.
The new cremators have a specific setting for cremating infants.
Some parents told the inquiry that having even a “teaspoonful” of ashes would have helped them come to terms with the death of their babies.
One said failing to hand over ashes “felt like body snatching”.
Glen Perkins, who formed the Action for Ashes campaign group, lost his daughter Olivia to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in 2007.
“We don’t have a headstone or plaque in the ground for her because we had nothing to put there,” he said.
“I don’t know where my baby is. Is she mixed in with someone else, has she been scattered at sea, in a river or a beach?”
Mr Jenkins said it was clear there was “no more painful experience” than losing a child and that the issue of infant cremation should be treated as of “the utmost importance”.
Shropshire Council said it would be liaising with parents and Cooperative Funeralcare to ask their views on a suitable memorial or memorial service.
Read more:http://www.bbc.com
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