Who Guards the Dead?: The Funeral Industry's Black Hole
Just before Parliament prorogued, I set out to the House of Commons what I would be looking for in the new session: the chance to implement a comprehensive suite of regulation for the funeral industry.
In my Gosport constituency, a funeral directors had recently been found to have left 46 bodies in an unrefrigerated environment. By chance, in December 2023 bailiffs had entered Richard Elkin and Hayley Bell’s premises to repossess the property but were confronted with a scene that would not have been out of place in a horror film.
Two dead bodies were found decomposing in a room with bloodstained floors, where water was dripping from the ceiling and the windows were broken. It is impossible to overstate the squalor found behind the front door of Elkin and Bell Funeral Directors, but what compounded the horror was the fact that the law did not offer protection for the bodies that had been found there, or their families.
For me the discovery was the beginning of a fight for new laws to protect the dignity of the deceased. When the brilliant officers of Hampshire and Isle of Wight came to convict Elkin and Bell, they found a judicial black hole. Instead, they had to rely on the Victorian-era crime of preventing a lawful and decent burial as well as public nuisance and fraud charges. There are currently no minimum standards of care for deceased persons, no minimum qualifications for those that practice in the funeral industry, and no regime of inspection for the businesses that house the dead.
Legislators might not want to be discussing funeralcare regulation at this political moment, when the Government is seeking ways to grow the economy, face down the threats of an increasingly dangerous world, and wrestle with our standing among international allies and partners. The subject is not only morbid but something that still borders on taboo. I have even taken to issuing trigger warnings to people when I discuss the subject.
It’s an inescapable truth that how we treat the deceased reflects the strength of our society. By that measure, following similar harrowing stories in Hull and Leeds, our society is weakening. I predict that more scandals where funeral directors have mistreated dead bodies will emerge over the coming years if action is not taken by the Government to implement a licensing scheme.
Consumer changes in the funeralcare industry are increasing the opportunity for malpractice. We all recognise the advertisements on telly that feature an elderly couple explaining that they were happy to have sorted their funeral arrangements. “We just didn’t want any fuss,” they say. They explain that they have booked a direct cremation.
Direct cremation expanded from just 3% of funerals in 2019 to 20% in 2023, and is ripe for abuse. In that process, with an unscrupulous funeral director, care for the body is an afterthought, because it is nothing more than a conveyor belt for the dead where the family does not at any point see the body. At the end of it all, who is to say that the ashes received are those of your loved one?
I spied in the King’s Speech a new Bill that offers an opportunity to put this right. The NHS Bill proposes a Single Patient Record and a modernised NHS, and most importantly is sponsored by the Department for Health and Social Care, who, after a behind-the-scenes argument with the Ministry of Justice, I’ve been told carry responsibility for regulation in this area. A Single Patient Record may offer an opportunity to track the body through the death pathway, lowering the risk that a body is mistreated or even misplaced. But there is so much more to do to restore trust in a sector where, it must be hoped, the majority of actors play by the rules and with great professional integrity: expanding the remit of the likely regulator, the Human Tissue Authority; clamping down on meaningless qualifications from unofficial course providers; and giving local authorities the resources they need to inspect funeral directors.
My worry is that it is too complex for the Government to open the windows and let the sun in on this opaque industry. They are yet to respond to the Recommendations of the vital Fuller Report that relate to reforming funeral directors, and have told me they will do so in the Summer.
But as chaos engulfs the Government, and legislating is put on hold to politics, I have no confidence that Ministers will prioritise action that is so urgently needed.
Dame Caroline Dinenage is the Conservative MP for Gosport. She is the former care minister and the current chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Carers.
