Forensic scientists are holding detailed talks with the government about setting up Britain’s first body farm, where researchers would study decomposing human corpses.

The aim would be to understand the precise manner in which cadavers decay in water or in soil or in open air. The US has several such centres, which have waiting lists of people who have left their bodies to forensic science. Their corpses are buried, hung from trees or immersed in water and analysed in detail to understand how they break down in different conditions. However, geographical conditions in America are very different from Britain’s, so researchers want to establish a centre here.

The lessons learned from the centres – which have featured in crime novels by Patricia Cornwell and in forensic science programmes on television – are then used to help find missing bodies and to understand when and how a person was murdered.

Anna Williams, a forensic anthropologist at Huddersfield University, said that cases like those of April Jones, Milly Dowler or the Soham murders “could have been helped with information of the type that we will get from such centres”.

“It would have allowed us to develop improved search and location techniques for finding bodies of people who had been missing for a long time. There is now an urgent need to establish one in this country,” Williams said.

Williams is one of the scientists involved in talks with the Human Tissue Authority (HTA) as part of the effort to have a body farm – or taphonomy facility as it is known officially – built in the UK. (Taphonomy is the study of the processes that occur in an organism after its death.)

“There is a real urgency to this plan,” Williams said. “If we do not get a taphonomy centre, UK forensic science will fall behind other countries.”

Last week the HTA confirmed it was holding talks and was in regular contact with the scientists involved. “Our aim,” a spokesman said, “is to ensure that, were such a facility to be established in the UK, the consent of the individuals who donate their bodies would have primacy and the activities taking place would be subject to the same standards as those required in other areas of research where human tissue is used.”

Another British scientist pressing for a body farm – John Cassella, a professor of forensic science education at Staffordshire University – said that much more research was needed.

“In science, we get answers by carrying out experiments, and forensic science is no different,” he said. “We need to carry out experiments on corpses to understand the processes that take place in humans after they have died and that is just the sort of thing we would do at these centres.”

Until now, British scientists have used pigs – which have physiological similarities to humans – to try to understand what happens to a body after death. This has led to important breakthroughs in identifying chemicals that linger around places where bodies are buried, chemicals that can still be detected years later. These semi-volatile chemicals can be found on the surface and they can lead police to the place where a body is buried.

However, those pushing for a body farm in Britain say that this process could be made much more accurate and useful – which would save police time and money – if they could use human bodies and not those of pigs.

There are now six body farms in the US and plans are under way to build two more. University of Technology Sydney, in Australia, also has a facility, while in the Netherlands, Amsterdam’s Academic Medical Centre plans to open one this year.

“Each of these facilities studies how local conditions affect the decay of human bodies,” said Cassella. “America has very different climate and geology from the UK. So we need one that will provide us with information about how these processes will occur here. ”

According to the magazine Research Fortnight, public acceptance of a body farm may pose a problem, though this could be avoided if the centre was introduced in phases, with the initial step being a facility that studied corpses that have been buried.

Williams estimated that such a farm would cost about £500,000 to set up. “Forensic research gets very little funding from research councils, so we are hoping that an academic institution within a university might help,” she said. “If not, we will turn to crowd funding. More and more research is being funded this way.”