The business of dying: funeral costs soar

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.