They wanted to bury him near home

Fifteen years ago Hina Bokhari wanted to bury her father close to the family home in Merton, as he had asked. Finding a plot was a struggle. She sits on the London Assembly now. In August she used a City Hall audit to say the same news is waiting for more families: someone has died, and then you learn there is nowhere nearby to put them.

The numbers in that audit are blunt. The CDS Group, writing for the Greater London Authority in March, found that Camden, Hackney and Tower Hamlets already have no burial space. Seventeen boroughs have fewer than fifteen years left. Nine of the twenty-five that answered said they already send funerals out of the borough because they have so little open ground.

This week the House of Lords is due to tidy a short private member’s bill that would make English planning authorities count the graves they have and write the gap into the local plan. The Hansard Society lists Friday for third reading, the last Lords stage, if peers have set committee aside. The sponsor is Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, in Sheffield.

“We routinely plan decades into the future for homes, employment, land and public services,” he told the House in July. “It seems only right that we should also plan for the final resting places that communities will inevitably require.”

Councils already have the power to open cemeteries. They are not required to. In many places the churchyard or the next borough over fills the hole. In some places nobody does.

Most people who die in England and Wales are not buried. The Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities recorded 83 per cent of deaths in 2024 ending in cremation. The shortage is not a queue of the whole country. It is the people for whom burial is not a preference.

For Muslims and Jews it is a religious obligation. In Sheffield, Lord Mohammed’s home city, officers told a committee on 16 July that Muslim burial capacity stood at about a year and a half to two years. Ellie Fraser, head of bereavement and coronial services, called citywide capacity “extremely limited, with particular pressure on Muslim burial provision.” Councillor Martin Smith said he had struggled to find a plot for his own father.

Leicester’s papers from January put about 2,700 new graves left at Gilroes and Saffron Hill, against roughly 500 a year. Officers thought those cemeteries would be full around 2030/31. Suleman Nagdi, who has worked with the council on the shortage, said burial is not optional in his community.

In Westoning, a Central Bedfordshire village of about two thousand people, Lord Jamieson told the Lords there were six spaces left. He has been a councillor there for seventeen years, trying to find a site. The green belt and the water table got in the way.

The Law Commission reported in March on burial and cremation law that has barely moved in 170 years. It recommended that graves more than a century old could be reused more widely, with a year for relatives to object and another twenty-five years if they do. London boroughs already have reuse powers. Most of the rest of England does not. The government has not yet published its response.

At second reading, housing minister Baroness Taylor of Stevenage thanked Lord Mohammed and said she had reservations about putting this in statute. The National Planning Policy Framework already lets councils treat cemeteries as community facilities, including on green belt. The current text does not name burial grounds. A draft that might is still being digested. Local plans, she said, keep the flexibility for places that are not short of land.