With many families still struggling with the recession – and with the prospect of further economic storms to weather – it can be a big blow financially if you suddenly find you need to pay for a funeral. This is particularly true if the death comes totally unexpectedly. The capital city of Honduras, Tegucigalpa, now offers poor families who suffer bereavement a funeral paid for by the state. Should Britain do the same thing?
Free funerals in Honduras
Honduras is a small country in Central America, nestled between southern Mexico, El Salvador and Nicaragua. The capital city Tegucigalpa is home to 1.1 million people, and suffers from a terrible reputation for violent crime.
Rates of murder and gang violence in Tegucigalpa have sky-rocketed ever since the 2009 coup against President Manuel Zelaya, which prompted a wave of political killings, fed by the easy availability of cheap guns brought across the border by Mexican drug gangs.
Honduras now officially has the highest murder rate in the world, with a violent death taking place every 74 minutes, compared to only 1.7 each day in the United Kingdom.
Many of the affected families are poor, and when gang violence is combined with high levels of disease, death in childbirth and high infant mortality, funerals are a tragically frequent occurrence in this bustling, tropical city.
When Ricardo Alvarez was campaigning to become mayor of Tegucigalpa seven years ago, he saw people were being buried in plastic bags because their families couldn’t afford a coffin, and decided that the state should step in to help them. Ever since he came to power, The People’s Funeral Service has existed to take the burden of paying for a funeral off these poor families.
Anyone who suffers a bereavement but is judged to be too poor to afford a funeral is eligible for help from The People’s Funeral Service. Two funeral homes are operated by a team of 18 people working in shifts, to be available for call-outs around the clock, 24 hours a day. They collect the bodies and arrange them in simple wooden coffins so that the family can hold a wake, which usually lasts for 12-14 hours.
As many of the families who suffer bereavement would be too poor to afford a proper private funeral, this is a vital service which allows people to say their final farewells in dignity. The question is: should the UK government offer something similar?
Free funerals in the UK?
There is some government assistance available in the UK, in the form of a Funeral Payment from the Social Fund, but this is capped at £700 and only available to people who receive certain types of benefit.
Moreover, with even the most basic funeral costing the best part of £2,000, a Funeral Payment from the Social Fund does little to alleviate the financial burden experienced by bereaved families at an extremely challenging time.
So what more could the government do? Following the example of the free funerals in Tegucigalpa, the government could offer to provide a full funeral service for families who suffer an unexpected death, and are judged to be too poor to pay for one themselves.
Such a scheme, like the one in Honduras, would need to operate by actually providing a funeral service, rather than just handing over a sum of money, in order to prevent it being abused. There would need to be a stringent means-test to make sure the family weren’t able to pay for one themselves, and there would have to a way of proving that the death was genuinely unexpected, and the victim hadn’t been suffering from some kind of long-term disease, for example, which played a part in their death.
Clearly, the technicalities would not be straightforward. Yet such a scheme could do a lot to minimise the distress felt by families who’ve been unexpectedly bereaved, saving them from having to worry about finances when they’ve already trying to navigate the emotional minefield of grief. If they can offer this to people in Honduras, why not in the UK as well?
The following BBC blog contains more information about the People’s Funeral Service in Tegucigalpa:
BBC News – Honduras murders: Where life is cheap and funerals are free
To find out more about applying for a Funeral Payment from the Social Fund, please visit our FuneralDirectors.co.uk guide
