In Scotland, the Burial and Cremation (Scotland) Act 2016 provides for an inspection regime for funeral premises, a code of practice for funeral directors and a funeral director licensing scheme; however, there is no such scheme of regulation in England and Wales or in Northern Ireland.

As regular readers will know, preventing a lawful and decent burial of a dead body is an offence at common law in England and Wales and in Northern Ireland, and there have been a few serious recent examples of convictions. Robert Bush, of Legacy Independent Funeral Directors in Hull, is currently awaiting sentencing after admitting to hoarding 30 bodies and a significant quantity of human ashes and to running his business fraudulently. In February, Richard Elkin and Hayley Bell, who ran Elkin and Bell Funerals in Gosport, Hampshire, were jailed for four years after keeping 46 bodies in unrefrigerated conditions.

In 2020, the Competition and Markets Authority recommended establishing an inspection and registration body to monitor funeral directors’ standards of transportation and care for the dead, alongside measures to increase price transparency for funerals (which, I suspect, might have been the CMA’s principal concern). The result of the recent convictions has been to renewed calls for the regulation of funeral directors, and the Chief Executive of the National Association of Funeral Directors, which subjects its members to unannounced inspections and sets guidelines for handling bodies, has voiced support for regulation.

It now appears that regulation might be in the offing. Last week, the BBC reported that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Wes Streeting, had taken the matter on board; he is quoted as saying:

“We will be taking a lead in the Department of Health and Social Care of working across government to make sure we’ve got effective funeral legislation in place.”

Whether it will be through targeted legislation or by including it in a broader health policy bill remains to be seen, and I suspect there will be a consultation before any final policy announcements are made.

As to the related issue of offences against dead bodies, in answer to a question in the House of Lords on 22 April, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the MoJ, Baroness Levitt, noted that there is a separate Law Commission project looking at offences against the deceased, and that the Government

“will consider all the recommendations issued recently by the Law Commission and the various workstreams to see what is the most practical approach to publishing our response, including timing, to make sure that we do not do things piecemeal in a way that, in the end, makes things worse rather than better.”

Yet more watching this space…

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