A border dispute has tripled the cost of my mother’s burial

theguardian.com:

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.

If my mother had lived a few hundred yards away, over the parish boundary, it would have been £600.NG, Limpsfield, Surrey

Interment charges levied by local authorities and parish councils are uncapped and unregulated and can dwarf the cost of a funeral director. One London borough charges £10,000 for people from outside the council’s jurisdiction. It’s reasonable for new plots to reflect the cost of land, its maintenance and popular demand. And a charging system that helps preserve cemeteries for local ratepayers makes sense.

However, it’s extraordinary that those charges apply to someone joining their spouse in a plot already leased by the family. It seems especially unfair, given that the price differential was introduced years after you buried your father and, that, since your local cemetery is full, you say you had no other option.