FUNERAL WASTE
By PROFESSOR HERMANN LEVY
Yet from a social point of view all this is of secondary importance. Indeed, its social incidence may be said to be confined to the fact that the rich, by their funeral extravagance, set a bad example to the poorer classes. Some soo,000 persons have to be buried per annum, and for those burying them the question is usually no other than to give them a " decent s' funeral and no more. But it is just here that the cardinal point arises. If such a burial cannot be provided the dreaded perspective is a Public Assistance funeral or a common interment. It is the first for certain, and the second possibly, which poorer families wish to avoid.
But a " respectable " private funeral is a costly affair in Britain. What a distinguished continental traveller wrote in 186o: " In England it is as expensive to die as tor live," still holds good. Studying pre-war funeral bills, one finds that for a coffin, a hearse, a motor-car for relations,. attendance and bearers in hardly any case was the sum less than £15 ; in most cases it would be nearer to £20. It cannot be denied that a sum of L243 may be needed when other small expenses which a funeral and the mourning require are added together ; but even the sum to be expended merely for the funeral, and not, as the technical term states, " in connexion with the funeral," is certainly far too high. The Con- ditions of the Contract for the Funeral of deceased War Pensioners, accepted by the Government in 1932, were £8 15s.
The choice between acceptance of a pauper funeral and payment by relations who can ill afford the money is, as things stand, evaded by recourse to industrial assurance. For a few shillings a week, so it temptingly appears, the working-class family is enabled to secure for all its members a " decent " funeral whenever death occurs.
▪ Unfortunately this system, which is a special feature of Britain and
the U.SA., has made burial not less, but much more, costly to the , poorer classes. There has never been an attempt to encourage a reduction of funeral bills and so increase the " purchasing power " of the funeral money to be paid out. On the contrary, a U.S. Commissioner of Labour Statistics once stated that insurance companies in that country had carefully fostered and propagated the desire for funeral display. This may not be true of British offices ; but they have certainly never thought of promoting a reduction of burial costs. The poor have to pay dearly for the benefit they derive from industrial assurance. In former days this system, which is enormously wasteful because it is based on canvassing for prospective clients and the collection of premiums at the house-door by an army of some 70,000 agents, resulted at one time in some 4o-5o per cent. of the premiums being spent on purely administrative costs. Today this " expense ratio " is still over 3o per cent. on the average, and with some offices over 40 per cent. Thus for every shilling which the worker pays in insurance for his funeral, or that of his relatives, about 4d. goes in adminis- trative charges alone. In order to secure the actuarial basis for a system under which a worker receives £20 at death, even though his insurance may have run only a few weeks or even days, a large sum of the total annual premium-income has to be put to reserves. So it happened that in 1938, as against a premium income of £io,000,000 and a total income of £82,000,000, not more than £31,000,000 was paid out in claims and other benefits, while no less than £23,000,000 went in management expenses. Is such expenditure necessary to bury 5oo,000 corpses? Even if we take the funeral money to be paid as £20, the State or some semi-official organisation, which would not require accumulated reserves, on an actuarial basis would not need more than Lio,000,000 per annum, while the purely technical administration would be no more costly than that of a post-office counter. It is for this reason that most countries have simply included burial insurance in their compulsory health insurance contribution and so guaranteed for a large part of the population at least an adequate but inexpensive ' burial. This was, in fact, planned originally by Mr. Lloyd George in 1911. The idea was dropped, as industrial assurance offices opposed it and suggested that the commercial exploitation of burial insurance should be left to them, offering at the same time their administrative machinery for the formation of Approved Societies. It is significant that two learned writers on " Industrial Assurance Salesmanship" (Messrs. A. E. Sharpe and Charles Taylor) should write: " Experienced agents canvass primarily for National Health members in order to open the way for introducing other and more profitable business." But Mr. Lloyd George's final decision was un- fortunately the reverse of " profitable " for those who should primarily have benefited—those insured under National Health Insurance.
If in the near future burial and funeral costs are to be reduced, the necessary steps are clear: industrial assurance administered by a multiplicity of over-lapping offices, with agents canvassing in a competitive struggle in the same streets, with an enormous expense- ratio and an uneconomical system of reserves, must disappear, funeral money becoming a statutory social insurance benefit. Burial reform, including the administration of burial-grounds, should become an exclusive right of the municipality. Funerals should be standardised, and democratic equality should be regarded as a fitting honour to the dead. Economies in coffins, transport, memorials and other display should be officially encouraged. Cemeteries should be of a dignified simplicity ; so should the crosses and headstones. The ideal system would be one under which all this would generally be uniform for all, as in the fighting Services, at home and abroad. In the war-cemeteries of Europe, officers and men lie, in the words of the Psalmist " High and low, rich and poor, one with another."
The nearest approach to this ideal in civil life is that of Switzerland,' where in St. Gall on one day it may be some rich man, a Counsellor of State, who is laid in a numbered grave, while the next to come, at his side, may be the body of the poorest citizen.
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