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Stop Dead, which is backed by Saga, Royal Mail and the Demographic Users Group, will see mailers pool their data to improve the efficiency of death sceening.

Emma Reid, a director of Stop Dead, said it already contained 800,000 names that were not covered by Mortascreen and the Bereavement Register.

Data comes from contributing organisations including Saga, where Reid was head of customer information until March. Stop Dead hopes to eventually attract 100 members from the volume mailing sector following its launch in September.

Reid said contributing members often received death information more quickly than suppression files and could now make it more readily available.

"These organisations are informed on a daily basis that people have died. However, it needs to be pooled. Commercial files claim huge coverage but they do not have access to all of the records."

Stop Dead will charge a £3,000 processing fee and will operate on a not-for-profit basis. Commercial rates could be as high as £80,000 claimed Reid, discouraging their use. However, she admitted organisations wishing to remove all dead would initially have to use both Stop Dead and commercial files.

Karen Webster, product manager for commercial file Mortascreen Plus said its cost was significantly less for most companies and that the file covered five million individuals going back to 1989. "It costs us money to obtain our data but we can guarantee companies that we will save them money," she said. "We are continually looking at new collection methods, but we need to be certain that they are correct."

She added that existing bereavement files were established in the market and marketers had confidence in them.

Reid said that Stop Dead will also lobby for the release of the Central Register of Deaths to marketers. This is currently collated from district registrars by the General Register Office. Its release would make other bereavement suppression files unnecessary, she said.

"We must first demonstrate that the industry has put its own house in order."

However, Webster said: "The Central Register will probably become available to marketers at some point but not in the near future. It is not complete at the moment and therefore cannot be used in a satisfactory way."