AN “ENORMOUS vacuum in the foundations and regulations” of the funeral sector risks “a number of rotten apples” exploiting the bereaved, the House of Commons has heard.
Introducing a debate early last week, the Conservative MP Simon Hoare urged the Government to introduce “licensing, regulation, or binding codes of conduct” for funeral directors, homes, and services.
This was very much the need of the sector, Mr Hoare said. It had the support of the Association of Green Funeral Directors, the National Society of Allied and Independent Funeral Directors, and the National Association of Funeral Directors, who, with Co-op, represented between 75 and 85 per cent of the industry.
“Most of the apples operating within the funeral barrels . . . are good ones, but everyone knows that there are rotten apples in every barrel,” he told the House. “It has long been recognised that this can be a sector that operates in good faith and on a belief — often misplaced — that our expectations of the decency and respect to be shown to the deceased will prevail in all circumstances.”
Previous Governments had, he suggested, presumed that “the whole lot works well and as we’d expect”. But this was not at all times the case.
Mr Hoare pointed to the Fuller inquiry, established in 2021 to analyze how the necrophiliac murderer David Fuller was in a position to perform inappropriate and illegal actions within the mortuary of Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, and why these went unnoticed. The final report of that Inquiry, published a yr ago, really useful that an independent regulator be created “as a matter of urgency”.
Contributing to the controversy last week, the Liberal Democrat MP Helen Maguire said that it had been “absolutely devastating to receive a bit of casework about abysmal funeral services, which included the mis-selling of a plot in an area cemetery, extortionate funeral costs and countless issues with a personal funeral company”.
She continued: “It is unacceptable that non-public cemeteries are almost entirely unregulated and are governed by burial Acts from the 1800s, which frankly are wildly outdated.”
Mr Hoare agreed. Serious prosecutions rested on the Burial Act 1857 which was “silent on the corpse’s treatment from the purpose of death through to the purpose of either internment or cremation”.
The Labour MP Mark Sewards said that he had recently brought two moms to fulfill the Victims Minister. “They tragically lost their babies in several circumstances, but each went to the identical funeral director, who did horrific things with their babies’ bodies. The police found nothing actionable because there isn’t a regulation of the funeral industry. That needs to vary.”
Mr Hoare expressed his sympathies, saying that, “As a society, our relationship with funerals is changing. We have change into, as we all know, a more secular society, so we’re searching for other ways to take care of funeral services, quite than the normal church service and so forth.”
The pandemic had, he continued, “definitely expedited the . . . cheaper, faster and more streamlined approach to coping with the deceased…There is little or little doubt that the lion’s share of operators are legit, above board, doing their best and doing it well, however the absence of regulation implies that, if we so wished, the Minister and I could arrange a funeral directors. We don’t need a licence.”
This had in some cases resulted in promoting scams. He proposed to make use of the Financial Conduct Authority to stop rogue funeral directors from operating.
Mr Hoare concluded: “The canon of evidence on the necessity for progress may be very clear and compelling. I suggest that the time for consultation and consideration has passed. The time is now for joined-up Government, energetic considering and speedy delivery, which can give comfort and confidence to each constituent.”
Responding, Dr Zubit Ahmed, who’s Under-Secretary of State on the Department of Health and Social Care, said: “ I completely understand his strength of feeling on this issue.” The Government had, he said, committed to providing an interim update on the Fuller recommendations from all phases of the inquiry before the tip of this yr, followed by a full response in summer 2026.
The second set of recommendations from the Inquiry were, nevertheless, more complex and would require a “co-ordinated and urgent approach across departments”.
