hope that you are well. We have received a response from The Parish Council. The section of their response that may be of interest to you is below: 

“The Parish Council is currently in the hands of City of York Council with regard to the organisation of the volunteers as the Parish Council does not have the resources to recruit, train, risk assess and insure teams of volunteers or organise volunteering events.  CYC's Communities Team is currently and unexpectedly short-staffed so it is taking a little longer than we had hoped.  There is a meeting between CYC Officers, Parish Councillors and me next Wednesday where we will receive an update from CYC on the current position but until then, I have no further news on what can be organised and when it can begin.

In addition to CYC, a local charity contacted me yesterday offering to help and they are putting a proposal together to be considered at next Thursday's Parish Council meeting.  I have yet to see the proposal but they are looking to help in the short term to bring in large numbers of volunteers over a short period and then to put systems in place to help in the longer term if needed.

The staff at Fulford Cemetery are doing their absolute utmost to clear the areas that we had thought would be less of a priority than the most frequently visited or active areas that had been identified for regular grass cutting but they can only do this within health and safety limited hours and only if there are no burials booked.  Some additional plots have been cut with the tractor this week and the Parish Council has contracted out one day of grass cutting to a team of contractors next week to assist the staff with some of the other plots - this of course comes at a cost that the Cemetery can ill afford and will only provide a rough cut rather than manicured lawns but it will assist those experiencing difficulties accessing graves in those areas.

With regard to this particular query - the Parish Council did not anticipate that public feeling would be so strong about a temporary change to the maintenance programme, a change caused solely to financial losses which have necessitated a reduction in staff.  The Parish Council also had no reasonable notice of the substantial decline in income that has necessitated the change this year.  Until May of this year, the Parish Council was unaware that CYC had volunteering systems that could be made available to it to help at the Cemetery so it had not been able to implement the assistance of volunteers sooner - I am the only employee of the Parish Council other than cemetery operatives and we have no other resources at our disposal.  The future operations at the Cemetery are under review between the Parish Council and City of York Council and it is hoped that volunteers will not need to be used as a long term and ongoing solution to grounds maintenance.”

I hope that this answers your questions. If you need further support with this, please do get back in touch. 
 Kind regards, 
Cora Lancashire
On behalf of Rachael Maskell
Labour and Co-operative MP for York Central
01904 623713