Last month, the directors of a Hampshire funeral home were convicted after six decomposing bodies were found in a mortuary room.
The convictions, the latest in a series of scandals over the handling of remains, have sparked widespread calls for a new regulatory body.
Separately, the Fuller Inquiry, commissioned to investigate how maintenance worker David Fuller was able to sexually abuse more than 100 deceased women and girls in hospital mortuaries between 2005 and 2020, found the sector was in “an unregulated free-for-all”.
Ministers are expected to back calls for a regulator, but a full response is not expected until summer 2026, with MPs and the wider sector pushing for faster action. Conservative MP Simon Hoare said in October that the lack of regulation “cannot continue”.
In 2023, the National Association of Funeral Directors (NAFD) conducted a survey that found almost half of all UK families were waiting more than three weeks for a funeral to take place; 14 per cent of families were waiting a month or more, and directors say that waits are increasing.
Rachel Bradburne, the NAFD’s director of external affairs, told The i Paper the process carried out after a person dies must be overhauled, and that accountability would be improved by the presence of a regulator.
“The time between death and funeral in the UK has been increasing for about 20 years” – from around 10 days to four or five weeks, she said.
The sector has also warned of some businesses operating at a sub-standard without proper regulation and lack of mortuary capacity, with some resorting to surge space created in the pandemic.
Organisations all ‘work in silos’
The Financial Conduct Authority has regulated pre-paid funeral plans since 2022, but while providers are encouraged to join industry bodies like the NAFD, the industry as a whole is not under any nationwide regime.
James Schofield, who runs Radcliffe Funeral Services in Yorkshire, said that this is partly because the different organisations involved “all work in silos”. “Families are pushed from pillar to post, with no real continuity of knowing what is happening, what should be happening, who is doing what,” he added.
He warned there is differing service depending on postcode, with people waiting anywhere between two days and two weeks for the paperwork to be completed.
When someone dies in England or Wales, a doctor must produce a medical certificate confirming the cause of death, which, since September 2024, must be checked by an independent medical examiner. Only then can the family go to their local registry office to submit the death and start organising the funeral.
Abi Pattenden, who works for Freeman Brothers Funeral Directors in Sussex, added that “there is a real lack of cohesion between the different parts of the system” and that while involving a medical examiner is a “good idea”, it can add “up to a week onto the process”.
Abi Pattenden said that delays at one stage of the death pathway can cause a spiral (Photo: Anneli Marinovich Photography)“It then becomes a spiral,” she added, because people must wait longer to be able to register the death, which delays booking the crematorium, for example, which means that slots start to be booked further in advance, causing delays for other families coming down the line.
‘Dignity of the deceased will be compromised’
People have also had difficulty securing an appointment at a register office since Covid, Ms Bradburne said, adding that during the pandemic – when people could register deaths remotely – the system ran more smoothly.
“Because we have a limited amount of refrigerated storage capacity in the UK, the longer that people are staying in care before they go for their funeral, it means that that capacity is at its limit at all times,” with funeral directors sometimes having to work together to move bodies around and stop the system becoming overwhelmed, Ms Bradburne added.
She said the sector is “very concerned that the dignity of the deceased will be compromised and it will possibly result in a public health incident” if there is a pandemic again, because there is also a lack of surge capacity.
Some providers have had to continue using temporary mortuary spaces erected during the pandemic due to capacity issues.
The NAFD is calling for doctors and hospitals to be given set timeframes for completing cause of death certificates and a regulator to be instated.
A regulator would also be able to impose minimum standards on and carry out inspections of funeral directors, who are currently not required to meet any official guidelines. Some providers do not have physical premises, and Ms Bradburne said that on occasion, providers carrying out direct cremations simply rely on hospital mortuaries for storage.
A regulator would also be able to impose minimum standards on and carry out inspections of funeral directors, the NAFD said (Photo: Sara Danielsson / Getty)“You can literally set up online tomorrow and start taking people into your care in an estate car or a private ambulance,” she said.
If one provider operates at a substandard level, “it sort of tars us all with the same brush”, Mr Schofield said.
“It’s incredibly difficult when we’re going up against people who have incredibly low standards when we’re trying to hold ourselves to the highest standard.”
He gave an example of a provider one of his clients had previously visited, whose parlour had smelled of cats and dogs, with marks on the furniture, and who had met them wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt.
Ms Bradburne said that funeral directors should have to undergo background checks, arguing that people working with vulnerable adults or children undergo an enhanced DBS check. “If you’re dead, you’re very, very vulnerable, and bereaved people are vulnerable, so we certainly want to see background checks required.”
She added that the creation of a unique identifier for deceased people – perhaps their NHS number with an extra letter or asterisk – which would “follow them through the whole pathway,” would both enable the family to see what stages had been completed and would also help identify those involved in their transport and care, to ensure safeguarding.
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The Government has accepted several of the recommendations from the Fuller Inquiry regarding issues such as access to the deceased in hospitals, but the question of a statutory regulatory regime is still under consideration.
“We are working closely with the NHS, local authorities, the Human Tissue Authority, the Care Quality Commission, and other partners to explore how we can ensure that robust and consistent standards are in place across all settings,” health innovation and safety minister Dr Zubir Ahmed told MPs earlier this month.
The Department for Health and Social Care and NHS England have been contacted for comment.
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