Says The Mail on Sunday:
With undertakers unable to extend credit, some poor families are having to wait more than two months before receiving government help paying for funerals, the weekly tabloid said.
Bereaved families can apply to the Department for Work and Pensions if they can prove they are receiving state benefit payments and cannot afford to foot the bill.
Around 27,000 people per year receive cash for funerals from the DWP’s Social Fund, totalling 46 million pounds (78 million dollars, 58 million euros).
Where’s the outrage over this national disgrace? Where is the indignation about Britain having become such a third world nation it cannot even afford timely funerals for its decenthardworkingfamilies? The tabloids are quick to predict doom and gloom whenever a strike does even so much as mildly inconvience a sub-editor, with warnings about a return to the “Winter of discontent” when “the dead were left unburied”, but this time? Not so much. You’d think waiting times of more than two months rate more than just a small article in the Mail on sunday when the largely fictitious accounts of the late seventies are still trotted out as dire warnings thirty years later, but nary a peep.
But then this doesn’t concern the comfortable middle classes, as they all have decent insurance for this. And if it doesn’t happen to the middle classes, it doesn’t exist. People who are so irresponsible as to work a job on which they can’t even afford their own funeral have only themselves to blame. They should’ve become merchant bankers erm stock broker erm estate agent never mind…
But still, 46 million pounds to pay for 27,000 funerals? That’s some 1700 pounds per funeral. Not exactly cheap, is it?