General Insurance Article - Royal London comment on The Funeral Time Bomb

 “This new report is spot on. It gathers insight from a broad range of sources - including Royal London’s National Funeral Cost Index - and confirms, yet again, what numerous experts have been saying for many years: the cost of a funeral is rising and drawing many people into debt. Royal London’s own study in October last year found 109,000 UK adults live with funeral debts passed on from the deceased – on an individual basis the average debt is £1,305, and collectively this equates to £142m across the UK.

  

 “We believe a fundamental review of the ‘Social Fund Funeral Payment’ system (the UK’s funeral state safety net) is required - it is incredibly important but increasingly inadequate. For example, its cap of £700 (designed to meet ‘other funeral expenses’) isn’t index-linked to inflation or adjusted to reflect current UK living costs; it also asks bereaved relatives to commit to significant funeral costs when they have no idea if they will qualify for a payment or how much it might be.

  

 “The International Longevity Centre is right to refer to the issue as a ‘time bomb’. The combination of rising funeral costs, rising number of deaths, plus an inadequate state safety net will not only continue to drive poverty, but also means we are likely to see a rise in the usage of Public Health Funerals - with haunting echoes from Victorian times. We foresee an increasingly polarised society divided between those who can and those who can’t afford a funeral – a society willing to take on significant debt to pay for a decent funeral.”