Home Office draws up plans for reusing coffins in case of a flu pandemic

Funeral parlours and crematorium staff would have to work around-the-clock seven days a week, while funeral services would be reduced to the most basic "no-frills" ceremonies without hymns or eulogies to save time.

Doctors and coroners would be dragged out or retirement to help cope with the numbers of dead.

Even benefits offices would have to take on extra staff to handle the numbers applying for cash hand-outs to cover funeral expenses and as family breadwinners die.

The grim predictions form part of a Home Office consultation to help plan the practical steps needed to deal with a pandemic.

The document warns that an outbreak could cause 650,000 'extra' deaths over a four month period, and adds: "History and science suggest that we are very likely to face influenza pandemics this century."

Previous Department of Health reports have put the figure at up to 750,000.

The Home Office study looks at the problems of maintaining "dignity and respect" for vast numbers of dead bodies, while struggling to maintain legal checks on such huge numbers of deaths, once the volume of cases and staff illness and death combine to make normal processes "unsustainable".

"Cemetery managers are likely to want to move to provision of common graves, which would allow interments to be undertaken more quickly due to the more efficient mechanical preparation of the site", according to the paper, entitled Planning For A Possible Influenza Epidemic.

These mass graves may have to be dug on new sites outside cemeteries if space runs out, it adds, particularly in inner city areas.

Families' choice of funeral services is likely to be severely curtailed, even if funeral directors take on more staff and stay open seven days a week offering a minimal service - with no special cars for mourners, for example.

Congested crematorium chapels will have insist on basic, shorter services, with longer memorial services held elsewhere, and cemeteries will have offer "shorter time slots" for burials.

Shortages of coffins could become a serious problem, and the document even suggests removing bodies to cremate them separately, so that the coffin can be re-used.

Hospitals and local authorities will try to minimise the huge pressure on mortuaries by moving bodies to burial as quickly as possible.

Even so, large temporary sites are likely to be needed using tents or cargo containers to hold bodies. The policy would be to avoid using refrigerated trucks as overspill mortuaries, but that could quickly become 'unsustainable' as space runs out, the study admits.

Registrars, coroners and doctors would also struggle to keep up with the volume of death certificates and registrations.

As well as bringing doctors out of retirement to help, nurses could be given emergency powers to sign death certificates.

With thousands of prisoners likely to die in jail, the need for full inquests into all deaths in custody could be suspended under more emergency powers.

Registrars would stop bothering with births and marriages during a pandemic and concentrate on trying to keep proper records of deaths.

They may have to stay open around the clock and take details over the phone rather than face-to-face.

The last influenza pandemic occurred in 1968-9, when a newly mutated virus known as Hong Kong flu killed an estimated one million people worldwide, including thousands in the UK.