Social Fund Funeral Payments

Philip Boswell Excerpts

Wednesday 14th September 2016 Westminster Hall

[Philip Boswell (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I thank the hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) for securing this debate on such an important matter. Like many hon. Members here, I participated in last year’s debate on funeral poverty and am pleased to see that the Work and Pensions Committee has since conducted an inquiry into the matter. I agree with the Committee’s recommendation that the price of a basic funeral should be agreed with the industry and that social fund funeral payments should be set at that level.

As others have noted, the level of state support via social fund funeral payments has been frozen since 2003. According to research by the Fair Funerals campaign, the average award of £1,225 covers only 35% of the cost of a funeral. For those who do not meet the qualifications to receive the payment, finding the money to cover the difference is incredibly difficult—many Members mentioned that in this debate and in previous debates.

As indicated by research conducted by the Fair Funerals campaign and others, for various reasons many do not shop around for funeral quotes. Oft times, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) said, they are initially offered higher-priced services by funeral directors rather than being given lower-priced services.

I have recently been made aware of a case in my constituency of Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill about a local funeral home that, notably, had not signed on to the fair funerals pledge. My constituent had requested that a non-essential component of the funeral not be included. However, they were billed for it and later told that they owed the money, because that non-essential service was standard. Furthermore, they were significantly overcharged for services that, because of the circumstances of the death, would have been impossible for the funeral home to provide at all. I do not have time to go into the detail, but when a family member of the deceased attempted to discuss the discrepancies in the bill with the funeral home, they were ignored and forced to pay the bill.

In the light of that case and others that have been reported, I welcome the Work and Pensions Committee’s recommendation that an index of local funeral directors and their comparative costs for a fair funeral should be publicised. I further suggest that the industry-agreed price of a basic funeral—the price at which the social fund funeral payment is to be set—should also be publicised, with a breakdown of the services included in it, as other hon. Members touched on. Easy access to that information would be most helpful, and I would welcome the introduction of an eligibility checker.

In North Lanarkshire, the council area in which my constituency falls, funeral costs rose by 13% between 2014 and 2015 alone. According to Citizens Advice Scotland, the total cost of a funeral for those living in my constituency falls somewhere between £2,600 and £8,000. As more than half of households in North Lanarkshire have an annual household income of under £20,000, the cost of a funeral in my constituency can represent more than a third of annual household income.

The cost is particularly acute since a third of the UK population have savings of £250 or less. Recent reports have found that not only are many unable to pay for the cost of a funeral, but 40% of people find themselves forced to incur high-interest credit card debt or forced to take out a high-interest short-term loan to cover the shortfall. According to a finding published in The Guardian on 20 October 2014, Jobcentre staff have actively been encouraging individuals to take on such debt to pay for funeral costs.

A defence that funeral providers often use is that users have a choice of services. But, given the urgency of the situation, the lack of transparency in the options and costs that many funeral services provide, the cultural and social pressures to provide a good send-off and the difficulty of dealing with any administrative issue while in grief and often shock, some funeral providers are clearly taking advantage.

Given the rising cost of funerals and the number of people forced to take on short-term high-interest debts such as payday loans to pay for them, I suggest that an extension of the eligibility requirements for receiving a social fund funeral payment should be taken into consideration, to limit the number of individuals forced to take on debt to cover the shortfall. The social fund funeral payment is essential for those on lower incomes. However, it is set too low, the administration is bureaucratic and cumbersome for people at their most vulnerable, and the current qualifications for receiving it are too strict. I therefore urge the Minister to work to eradicate funeral poverty through amending the funeral payment; to take those providing funeral services to task; and to consider the recommendations of the Work and Pensions Committee and the points made by hon. Members today.