Portchester Crematorium services are set to be extended to 45 minutes as longer timeslots become popular

A report published ahead of Monday’s meeting of the joint committee of councillors from Portsmouth, Fareham, Havant and Gosport which manages the facility recommends an initial six-month trial.

‘Having mostly 30-minute time slots causes regular issues with services running over when we have bookings one after the other,’ it says. ‘People are having services with more music and visual tributes that they squeeze in to 30 minutes but…the service time should only be around 20 minutes to allow time to enter and exit the chapel, so it is very easy to run over.’

Under the existing arrangement only four 45-minute spaces are available each day at the crematorium and the report says these are usually booked out weeks in advance.

‘We are regularly asked to book double slots so they can have an hour for a service which we can’t do here, as we have no separate fee for extra use of the chapel,’ it adds.

The latest findings by the Cremation Society found that there is falling demand for shorter services across the country with only 10 per cent of crematoria operating 30-minute timeslots, compared to 42 per cent in 2007.

An increase at Portchester Crematorium would lead to a reduction from 575 services a month to 506.

During its busiest month of the last five years, in the middle of the pandemic, 460 services took place with the report adding that even this could have been ‘easily accommodated’ by longer windows for services.

‘The [crematorium] staff have been consulted and they all agree there would be a great benefit to ease the pressure on services overrunning,’ the report adds. ‘Once one service overruns it is almost impossible to catch up with the rest of the day running on time unless we are lucky enough to have another service that doesn’t take the full 30 minutes.’

The crematorium was given a £200,000 upgrade, including new seating, lighting and flooring, in 2019 – the first time it had seen significant work since it opened in the late 1960s.