TODAY'S riddle: it is a residential development where no one lives and where no one wants to go. Yet it is almost full up, and demand for admission is overwhelming. Where is it? A cemetery.

Across the country, Britain's burial grounds are running out of room. Everywhere we look for a final resting place, we find our ancestors got there first.

There are only three possible solutions. Build more cemeteries. Re-use existing graves. Discover a cure for mortality.

The first idea is deemed impractical, at a time where open land of any sort is at a premium. The last, alas, seems as far off as ever.

So MPs are considering the middle course. A Commons Select Committee could yet propose that local authorities are granted the power to re-use existing graves.

It is the pragmatic, common sense solution, known in cemetery parlance as "lift and deepen". Old plots are opened and dug deeper. The existing occupants are lowered to make way for newer residents above.

Regulations governing human remains are contradictory. They can be moved to make way for housing developments and shopping centres - but not for creating new graves.

Even so, ministers have chosen to avoid the problem of overcrowded graveyards, probably fearful of public opinion.

Certainly the practical justification in favour of grave re-use is not enough to carry the argument. To merely contemplate moving human remains will distress some people. As the clerk of Pickering Town Council says today, such a suggestion "would be considered almost sacrilege" by townsfolk.

Yet the British people might not be so squeamish as is often imagined. If implemented sensitively, the re-use of graves would be supported by nearly two-thirds of the public, according to a 1995 survey.

The key word is "sensitively". That means leaving a substantial time period before moving remains. And even then, this should only be carried out with the approval of a group of people chosen to represent the local community, including members of the church.

Updated: 10:12 Friday, November 16, 2001