Muristek
We had already bought a lease for the plot when my father died, but were still charged £2,000
When my mother died recently, I’d budgeted for the funeral costs. What I had not budgeted for were the fees of the parish council which operates the only graveyard available. I was charged £2,000 for what was, effectively, permission to inter my mother in a plot we had already bought for my father, who died 40 years ago. The fee doesn’t include grave digging, and there’s a further £230 for permission to add my mother’s name to the headstone.
It’s especially unfair because we are being discriminated against for living on the wrong side of a town that happens to be divided into two parishes, Oxted and Limpsfield. When my father died in 1981, there was no room in the Limpsfield cemetery, so we paid £40 for a 100-year lease on a plot at Oxted, a mile from my parents’ house. Twenty years later, Oxted parish council decided to charge residents of Limpsfield parish triple the interment rate in Oxted.
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