The business of dying

Funerals don't have to be gloomy and costly.

When he dies, Mike Hoyland will be placed in a coffin painted in the colours of Liverpool Football Club. He will be carried along in a horse-drawn carriage to Liverpool's Catholic Cathedral, where he hopes a Requiem Mass will be celebrated by a priest wearing a red and white scarf around his neck.

As he is carried out of the church by his friends - he is realistic enough to accept that Liverpool's back four will probably not be available - the tune to Match of the Day will be playing.

Friends in football kit will attend a wake at a local pub, at which several hundred pounds will have been placed behind the bar. The instructions for the funeral, which have been given to his solicitor, include the codicil that anyone caught crying must buy a round of drinks.

Mr Hoyland is one of the many people who don't want their funeral to be a miserable affair, but he is one of the few who have actually planned it. The others - the vast majority of us - will have the arrangements made by funeral directors who mean well but know nothing about our personalities or life-long wishes.

Responsibility for our last journey will probably be given over at the last minute by grieving relatives, whose suffering will be made worse by the subsequent impersonal ceremony at a dull church or office-like crematorium, by the lack of warmth, by the absence of any form of celebration for the life that went before the death.

"That's not for me," says Mr Hoyland, 34, a businessman from Leicester. "I want my friends to remember the good things and the fact that I enjoy life. Everyone says that, but how many do anything about it?"

Well, until this week, almost nobody. But then the publication of the morbidly named Dead Citizen's Charter, by a think-tank called the National Funerals College, was followed by the opening of the country's first funerary supermarket - based loosely on the French supermarche du mort - at which cut-price caskets in chipboard and cardboard rub shoulders with coffins that double up as bookcases and wine racks. Suddenly, fun funerals, DIY funerals and cheap funerals are on our doorstep.

Lord Young of Dartington, the founder of the National Funerals College, explains: "People are entitled to the funeral they have chosen and to one that helps their loved ones to deal with their loss."

Lord Young has come up with a 24-point plan to guarantee the rights of all those involved - even, or perhaps especially, the dead.

The right to information is perhaps the most important of their demands, given that a Consumers' Association survey recently found that one-third of funeral directors failed to provide estimates before hitting bereaved people with bills averaging pounds 1,015 for a burial and pounds 888 for cremation.

But funeral directors may not be the villains of the peace. The college and the National Association of Funeral Directors (NAFD) are more concerned about the way that local authorities, the owners of cemeteries and crematoria, treat bereaved families. Charges for burials are spiralling and cremation services in some areas are being limited to 20 minutes.

A survey by the NAFD, published here for the first time, shows enormous regional variations in the cost of being buried (see table). Graves in some parts of Wales cost as little as pounds 90, whereas in London, the same size plot can set you back pounds 1,800. Cremation, which 70 per cent of us now prefer, varies in cost from pounds 80 to pounds 250, depending on the region.

"I know funeral directors are often portrayed in a bad light, but our survey shows that local authorities' charges are increasing at an exorbitant rate," says Mary Stuart, the NAFD's spokeswoman.

"Since 1992, our members' rates have increased at about 8 per cent per year on average, while increases for the local authorities' side of the fees - crematoria, gravediggers, plots - range from 12.5 per cent in Yorkshire to almost 95 per cent in the north of England."

There is a capacity crisis in most graveyards, which means that councils are exploring radical options to meet demand, such as reusing old graves. The National Funerals College believes that councils are under pressure from the Government to become self-financing. If crematoria are privatised, charges could increase further.

All of which may bring a smile to the face of Sam Weller, who today opens the country's first funerary supermarket, Regale, in a former Co-op store in east London. He believes that he can cut about pounds 200 from the cost of the average funeral.

Customers, who are greeted by cheery lights and staff under orders not to wear black, can shop for coffins, flowers, gravestones, even tools to tidy the grave, before handing over the arrangements to Mr Weller or an undertaker of their choice. "They can put a coffin in the back of their car and drive off if they want," he says.

His prices - coffins from pounds 134 to the bookshelf-cum-casket at pounds 1,304 - are invariably cheaper than their counterparts ordered unseen from undertakers.

Mr Weller explains what led him into the business: "I was astonished at the lack of choice or consideration for the consumer. This was an industry stuck in Victorian times. We're trying to bring it up to date in a way that isn't tasteless."

Mr Weller's interest is commercial. Lord Young's is loftier, almost political. But both lead in the same direction: more consumer choice over how we deal with death. Yet even that is unlikely to cure the discomforting aspect of many funerals: the gaps they expose in the fabric of the modern family.

Mary Stuart, of the Association of Funeral Directors, says: "Very few people recognise the religious side of funerals these days. That, coupled with the fact that more people move away from their original roots, means that very few funerals are attended by more than just the immediate relatives and a few friends."

You can have your jazz band, and your coffin can be pulled by a team of huskies, but even that is unlikely to make sure the church is full.

Church fights price war

The Church of England may be losing its grip on the deaths of the nation. The Church Commissioners set a fee of pounds 57 for funeral services. The priest gets pounds 31. The rest goes to the parochial church council.

These fees have risen by more than 90 per cent in the past three years as part of the Church Commissioners' drive to recover from losses on property speculation in the Eighties. Now, unscrupulous undertakers are accused of using retired clergy to conduct cheaper services. The Rev Tom Ambrose, of the diocese of Ely, says that "a stiff letter" was sent to retired clergy in the diocese recently.Some crematoria were paying retired clergy as much as pounds 200 a day, according to Mr Ambrose.