It is more than half a century since Jessica Mitford published her landmark work of investigative journalism, The American Way of Death. But her exposé of the specific and often nefarious ways the funeral industry had made the average service more expensive remain pertinent today.
Back in 1963, Mitford, one of the celebrated aristocratic Mitford sisters, reflected on the mortuary’s talent for re-branding — bury became inter, coffins became caskets, morgues became preparation rooms. This, she argued, sanitised the funeral business and allowed those in the trade to hike up prices.
An updated version of Mitford’s book was published in 1998, two years after her own death, and is still widely available and widely read. Perhaps it’s no surprise that a work focusing on the eternal human preoccupation with mortality has stood the test of time. Whatever the case, it’s certainly true that the issue of funeral costs continues to provoke and rile.
A new study out today reveals that UK funeral prices have soared by ten times the increase in the cost of living in just a year – a year! According to SunLife’s report, the cost of dying is the fastest rising of any fixed cost in the UK, increasing much quicker than rent, food, utilities, insurance and clothing.
So, how much does the average person shell out for a funeral? When death-related expenditure such as probate, headstones and flowers are taken into account, in addition to the basic cost of a funeral, the figures stands at £8,802, an increase of 8.3 per cent since 2015.Let’s take a closer look at the stats. The funeral itself – which makes up 44 per cent of the cost of dying – has soared by 5.5 per cent in a single year. The average funeral in the UK now costs £3,897 which is more than double the figure when SunLife first started tracking funeral prices in 2004.
To put this in perspective, if the cost of a funeral had risen in line with the cost of living it would now cost £2,540; that’s £1,357 less than the actual figure.
Taking a longer view, SunLife calculated that, since 2004, the cost of a funeral has rocketed by 103 per cent.
Needless to say, London remains the most expensive place to die, with the average funeral costing £5,529, which is 42 per cent more than the national average. By contrast, popping your clogs in Northern Ireland is much cheaper at £3,277. But that’s still a 106 per cent rise in price over 12 years.
Graham Jones, director at SunLife said: ‘We all know that death will eventually come to us all, and therefore we will all need to pay for a funeral, yet it is something that, as a nation, we are uncomfortable talking about or planning for.
‘Unfortunately, this reluctance to talk death is not only causing financial issues, but emotional ones too. Our report shows that just 1 per cent of those organising a funeral knew the preferences of the deceased which means at a difficult time, many of us our forced to make decisions about a loved one’s funeral not knowing if it is what they would have wanted.’
The sky-high bill for dying means that many families have been forced to cut back or change some of the ‘send-offs’ they had planned for loved ones. These included spending less on the headstone, flowers and venue.
Today there is a Westminster Hall parliamentary debate into funeral poverty. Jessica Mitford would have welcomed the discussion but would have no doubt reiterated comments made in her book that the cost of dying is rising faster than the cost of living.
Helen Nugent is Online Money Editor of The Spectator
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