AIBU to question why taxpayers should fund Ian Huntley’s cremation?

It's a "hot topic" because IH was the perpetrator in a highly publicised child-murder case, the details of which caused a lot of public anger at the time and his death has of course attracted a lot of media attention. That doesn’t mean there is any logic to your argument, or that your suggestion is in any way workable in practice. The vast majority of comments have been attempts to explain to you why YABU.

I always associate sea burials with people who have served in the Royal navy and similar. People who served our country and had affinity with the ocean. Certainly not for a double child killer.

I think a direct cremation, with no fuss, body burnt straight away and ashes disposed of in secret with absolute minimal cost to tax payer is the ideal way for him to go.

Ok ditch him at sea, let's add that up?

Boat hire - £££

Fuel ⛽️

How many people do you need on the boat?
Minimum of 3, one to captain the boat, two to deal with the body. Possibly need four to man-handle the body.

What are you wrapping the body in?
Can't leave it in a plastic body bag, thats sea pollution.
Can't leave it unwrapped thats a danger to the boats crew.

How are you getting the body from the hospital morg to the boat? Thats another cost.

Insurance?

So actually a public health cremation / paupers funeral at the tax payers expense is probably a whole lot easier, cheaper and safer for all concerned

What if she were no longer alive? Should his children pay? What if he were childless, should his cousins pay? What if he had no cousins - should they seek out some distant relative in New Zealand and get them to pay?

At what point, in other words, would you stop trying to make someone else pay for the dead man being a murderer?

It doesn't seem to be much of a debate. I haven't seen one credible argument or alternative put forward by people arguing the tax payer shouldn't be paying for his funeral. It seems more people pointing out holes in the completey flawed logic.

You can't just bury someone anywhere. He won't be buried anyway, it will be a cremation as it's cheaper. It will basically be a 'pauper's funeral.

His daughter has already said she’s going to flush him down the toilet, so you know what? I would happily contribute in that circumstance

You're looking at this through an emotional lens but policy isn't dictated by emotion. If someone is murdered whilst under the care of the prison service then the prison service contributes to the cost of the disposal of that persons remains. They can't just rip up that policy and refuse to follow their own rules because you and a few others have a strong emotional reaction to the policy being applied to a particular individual.

It is possible to be disgusted by IH's crimes but still accept that people should be safe from murder when they are in the care of the state, and that the prison service carries some responsibility for the disposal of human remains when they fail to prevent a murder happening on their premises. You can't have system where the prison service accepts responsibility for some prisoners, but refuses to accept the same level of responsibility for others based on the strength of feeling that the general public and some sections of the press express about them.

Well you dont get to mske that decision
I cant imagine how she must feel
Im sure she hates what he did
But a love for a son and daughter is unconditional
She's must hsve suffered enormously knowing what he did.

It's around £1k per week to keep someone in prison, so the govt has already saved a good few quid.

It's half than that for a direct cremation. I can't get my knickers in a twist over disposal of his body.

All those trying to push responsibility onto his mother…..are you going to take responsibility should any of your kids end up in prison for carrying out a horrific crime and who then get murdered whilst in there?

No. Thought not.

But if not the tax payer, then who should pay for it? No one has yet come up with an alternative.

And as people said he isn't getting a funeral in the traditional sense. His body will just be going to the crematorium and burned to ashes which doesn't sound any much different than the methods you've suggested. Direct cremations don't have hymns, flowers etc and given the crimes he committed, I hardly think his family will want any of this anyway.

Yep. I wouldn’t care if he was executed for the murders, so I’m not coming from a place of sympathy but:

The rules are he gets his body disposal paid for. Why would an exemption be made just because this guy is well-known?

Other murderers have quietly had theirs paid for, and £3k is pennies really to just be done with the whole thing. Are there not other things we can be angry about?

It ain’t happening, can people just be pleased this saga with Huntley being looked after by the state is over and move on now? This is the families’ pain, I bet they’re also sick of it being dragged along the news etc.

Funerals are for the living, not for the dead. Huntley has already paid the ultimate price for his crimes. Who pays for his funeral won't affect him.

The only people the funeral costs will impact on is his family - who (I have read) hated him for what he did. That being said, no matter what he's done I wouldn't begrudge a mother grieving her son and can understand why she was at his bedside. A state funeral is appropriate to gift the family for a prisoner that was killed in prison tbh.

Huntley was a grown man in his 50s. His mum wasn't responsible for his crimes. Why should she pay? And how do you propose we make her pay for it anyway?

No one knows how we would react if our child had committed murder. Saying what we would do is one thing, it actually happening in real life is quite another. I don't think we can see her as being in touch with him as condoning his actions. None of us know how often she visited him or what the nature of their visits were.

Because he was murdered in a place where he should have been safe, and that place is owned and run by the British state.

In the good old days, of course, the bodies of criminals were put up in cages and decomposed in public as a terrible warning. I guess that was pretty cheap. But I must say it gives me the ick a bit.

And even then the body was disposed of…

Most people leave enough money or assets to fund their own funeral.

Which is what I said in the first instance. A basic cremation with no-frills and if anything more elaborate than that is desired, it should be paid for by his family.

The point I made is that whatever disposal method is used, and at whatever cost, it comes back to the tax payer. I am fully aware that this is just the way it is, sadly.

My comments regarding him being ditched at sea or dumped in an unmarked grave were alluding to the fact that this is all he deserves - literally a hole being dug somewhere off-grid and him being launched in - not a burial plot! Obviously I know that can't and won't happen. But it should!

I’m in the business of disposing of bodies. Sometimes of heinous people. Although not this particular one.

It’ll cost around £1300. You won’t know when it’s done. There will be no ceremonious pomp of a funeral, he will be quietly cremated and in 95% of cases like this, the ashes aren’t claimed.

Any of your own pennies are unlikely to go towards it so stop fretting and talking out your arse.

The thing is with these threads, I think it's a chance for people to think they're somehow morally superior by being angry that the tax payer is paying for his funeral yet offer absolutely no reasonable alternative for what the funeral arrangements would be or who should pay for this?

Ditching him at sea? So we have the cost of storing his body while we wait for the right weather to go out to sea, cost of hiring a boat, cost of staffing a boat, cost of a coffin and the cost of transport to wherever the boat is.

I can imagine will run significantly higher than a direct cremation. The mind honestly boggles.

Considering that his mother was still in touch with him, I agree she should pay. If she’d washed her hands of him, I’d say she should be free to have zero involvement or cost.