The city’s crematorium is now set for a £6 million makeover after plans to move elsewhere have been ruled out.

Worcester City Council is now looking to extend and ‘modernise’ the existing Astwood Crematorium after studies ruled out relocating to a different part of the city.

A report by the city council reveals the cost of refurbishing the crematorium would cost more than £6 million with yearly running costs of nearly £400,000 a year.

The work would take around 10 months to carry out. It has not been confirmed whether the crematorium would have to shut for the entire time.

Bosses now want to spend another £250,000 to draw up plans for the renovation and will ask the council’s environment committee to approve plans at a meeting in the Guildhall on July 18.

The designs and budget for the renovated crematorium would not be put to councillors until next spring at the earliest.

The council’s preferred option is to replace Astwood Crematorium’s three ageing gas furnaces with two new electric ones.

An extension would also be built to make way for new accessible toilets and the chapel would be re-orientated to look out towards the garden of remembrance.

A new covered entrance would also be built, and the crematorium’s chimney would be replaced with a shorter one.

The two new electric furnaces would cost at least £600,000 and nearly £1 million to install and run for the next 25 years – or around £70,000 a year.

However, energy costs would fall by £10,000 a year by switching to electric from gas, according to the council.

The council said switching to ‘green’ electric would also reduce carbon emissions by 80 per cent if a green energy tariff – which matches the energy you buy with renewable energy – was used.

The cheapest option would see the council use ‘grid’ electricity with each cremation costing £32 towards an annual bill, based on 1,700 cremations a year, of £54,500.

This is compared to ‘green’ electricity which would cost £38 per cremation with a predicted annual cost of £64,600.

But while more expensive to run, the ‘green’ electricity would cut the carbon emissions from each cremation down to zero compared to the 24kg that would be created using ‘grid’ electricity.

The council said its plan was the “most cost-effective” over the ‘dirtier’ gas option – which would have a bigger carbon footprint but would be around £1 million cheaper – and the costlier plan for ‘extensive’ cladding and bigger extensions which would total more than £7 million and come at a cost of at least £450,000 a year.

The council expects to bring in around £1.3 million this year from the crematorium – which is among its biggest earners - with the £400,000 annual cost of the new and improved crematorium reducing income to £960,000.

The council said it was “difficult to estimate” what the loss of earnings would be while the crematorium closed for the work but has worked out that the full loss of income across the 10-month would be just over £1 million.