Church of England votes to increase marriage and funeral fees

Fears that the poor could be priced out of church weddings as General Synod agrees to raise fees from £296 to £415
Church wedding
Church weddings will now cost £415, not including heating. Photograph: Juice Images/Alamy

It will be more expensive to get married or have a funeral in the Church of England next year after its law-making body voted to increase fees for both.

The General Synod, which is meeting in London this week, agreed to push funeral service fees up from £102 to £160 and wedding ceremony fees from £296 to £415 in an attempt to standardise costs across the country's 16,000 churches. The increase includes lighting and administration, but not heating, and comes into effect next year.

While there was overwhelming support for the price hike, some Synod members spoke against it.

Simon Killwick, a priest from the Moss Side area of Manchester, said: "Such a fee increase seems to me hard to justify in times of financial austerity and even harder to justify in poor inner-city parishes.

"The Church of England ought not to be seen to be making a big increase at this time and ought not to be making it difficult for the poor to access these services at a time when a simple ceremony can be had at a register office for around £100."

He warned that the Church of England could not rely on the right to waive fees in cases of hardship as it could place clergy in the "invidious position" of attempting to "means test" parishioners.

"People do talk," he added. "The poor don't want to be patronised by fees being waived. They want their church to be affordable to them. It would be a crying shame if poor people end up being married in register offices because the Church of England has priced them out of their parish church."

The bishop of Ripon and Leeds proposed the changes and said without them the Church of England would go back to the days of "plucking a figure out of the air".

John Packer said: "What it costs matters. Those who are being married in our churches do understand there is a need to contribute to the reality of what it's going to cost."

There were some clerics pressing for a greater increase. The Rev Eva McIntyre, from Worcester, said a failure to include the cost of heating in a standard national fee meant that she, the chorister, the organist and the verger would ultimately pay the price.

"I'm quite disconcerted," she told Synod, "that we can tell people they can choose to have the heating on. We will freeze if someone is too tight to pay the £50 to have the heating on."

A spokesman for the Church of England later said he did not envisage a stampede of couples attempting to beat the price rise.