The manager of a north Liverpool credit union recently told me that the most shocking fallout of the recession and austerity was the sheer volume of people calling because they were unable to bury their loved ones. “People call from the hospital, because they can’t pay the £1,000 to get the undertakers to release the body,” she said. “And these people, they’re under 50. That’s no age to die.”

The sharp rise in funeral poverty is one of the grimmer trends in our unequal island: in the past decade, funeral costs have risen by 80%. Wages simply haven’t. The average funeral now costs £3,163 nationally, and £4,836 in London. If you’re on a low income, the cost of a sudden death is far beyond your modest means, and life insurance can seem like an unnecessary luxury when you’re struggling to heat your home and feed your children.

The families who contact Quaker Social Action (QSA), a small charity which offer advice on funeral poverty through its “Down to Earth” scheme, aren’t seeking a lavish send-off for their loved ones, just the ability to bury them at all. All too often, relatives are struggling to raise the necessary capital for a basic funeral, and have to battle to get clear information from funeral directors on costs and expenses.

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While struggling with grief, many people are unclear on what is a fair price to pay for a funeral – the attendant shame of asking whether prices need to be so high puts vulnerable people in an even worse financial position. People told QSA of funeral directors asking whether their deceased relative “deserved better”, with staff pressing relatives to pay more for embalming as it was “dignified for the deceased”. One woman contacted QSA when she was quoted £7,500 for a funeral by a firm who told her that was standard: the charity were able to find a provider for £1,500 nearby.

But that’s the issue – death isn’t a routine enough event for us to be familiar with the costs and implications of funerals, so QSA is calling for all funeral directors to sign its Fair Funerals Pledge, promising transparency in pricing and ethical behaviour. Families can then look online to see which local funeral directors have committed to be fair and honest about the costs involved.

That helps – but the problem of funeral poverty runs deeper, as QSA’s ongoing campaigning shows. Jacqui contacted the charity when her partner died suddenly. She was struggling to pay for his burial, and applied to the government’s social fund for help with funeral costs. Even when you apply for a social fund funeral payment, it only covers around 35% of the cost, then takes three weeks to come through if successful, by which time the funeral has passed.

But for Jacqui, there was a further shock: because she was on a zero-hours contract, she was deemed to be in work and therefore didn’t qualify for assistance, despite earning almost nothing. When she called the DWP helpline, to ask how she could pay for her partner’s funeral, she was told “let the council dispose of him”. The Social Fund has been slashed from £294m in 2010 to just £74m today, and the funds are not protected, meaning councils can raid them to relieve health and social care pressures in their area.

The Fair Funeral Pledge is a small step to address a growing and horrific problem. But the government also need to accept that people deserve dignity after their death, and that with the decimation of the social fund, and welfare cuts entrenching inequality, their policies are causing the perfect conditions for funeral poverty to flourish. We know huge swaths of the population can barely afford to live. Now people can’t afford to die, either.