Funeral Director Services Regulation

This was an appalling incident, and I pay tribute to Father Brian, who is a well-respected and widely liked parish priest based at St Joseph’s and St Edward’s in Darwen. He assisted the family, arranged for the majority of them to go home, sent away the mourners who had come to pay their last respects, and organised the removal of the deceased’s body from the grave, which had to be undertaken by cemetery workers and the remaining family members. The body was then returned to the funeral directors and another coffin was sought. The body was cleaned, having been at the bottom of the grave, and a team of pallbearers completed the burial the following day, which was Saturday 23 January.

It is absolutely apparent to my constituents that K.C. Funeral Services had been lacking in many areas. Given the distressing story I have just recounted, I am sure that right hon. and hon. Members can see why they would come to that conclusion. It is their view that the minimum standards required by law, or by decency in many cases, had not been met. The incident was exceptionally traumatic for the family, who were already grieving the loss of a well-loved family member. Following the incident, they went back to see Emma Childerley at K.C. Funeral Services on 28 January, in order to ask her some questions about the normal operating practices of her business. They were made aware at the meeting that K.C. Funeral Services was not a member of the National Association of Funeral Directors or the National Society of Allied and Independent Funeral Directors. She confirmed to the family—it was the first time they had heard it, and I must admit that it was the first time I had heard it—that both registration schemes are voluntary. Some funeral directors, including the one I have mentioned, do not join such schemes, largely because of the cost burden of doing so.

In what I hope will be a relatively brief contribution, I want to address the gap in the regulations that enables some providers to operate with limited or no regulation. The regulations do not enable families who have suffered in this way, or who have any other grievance, to pursue the funeral directors through a professional body. That is what I hope the Minister will address as we move through the debate.

I hope that the Minister will take up the excellent suggestion of my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings: to seek to work across Government to ensure that we find a solution to the doubt in this area in relation to regulation. What would be exceptionally helpful for the industry—and if he cannot do it today, it may be something for another day or something on which he could write to me—is to set out a direction of travel on regulation for all of those competing organisations. They should be given a period of time to get their own house in order, but they should understand that that is a limited period of time. Different regulators have competing interests, and they need some Government direction to work together, come together and be forced to talk to one another. If they fail to find an industry-led solution, which would be my preferred route, there should at least be an understanding that the Government will keep this under review and may, at some point in the future, intervene.

Unfortunately, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen illustrated in his speech, things can sometimes go wrong. First, may I offer my sincere condolences on the death of his constituent’s relative and say how shocked and sorry I am for what the family have been through? The events that he described are truly shocking, and no family suffering real grief following the death of a loved one should ever have to go through that. I can only imagine how difficult and traumatic the experience has been for them, without that being compounded by the events that he described. It will have been distressing not only for them, but for all the individuals in attendance. I note the professionalism of the individual in charge of the ceremony in helping all those affected to deal with it, and the professionalism that they showed in the impossible circumstances that they were presented with. I trust it was a rare and isolated incident, but that does not diminish or excuse the impact on those involved.

Quality standards in the provision of funeral director services are not prescribed by law. However, there is a broader regulatory framework with which funeral directors must comply, including health and safety legislation covering the safe handling and storage of bodies by funeral directors and their staff, and consumer protection measures, about which I will say more in a moment.

Inconsistency in quality standards was one of the issues identified in the report by the Competition and Markets Authority on its market investigation into the funeral sector, published last December. The report recommended that independent regulation of funeral director provision was needed to raise and maintain standards, and to standardise some practices, for example in the transport and storage of bodies

The Government’s response to the Competition and Markets Authority’s report was published on 7 April this year. While we accepted that there could be improvement in the sector, we did not propose moving to a full independent regulator at this stage. Given the impacts of the extreme pressure on the sector during the pandemic, the Government considered that this was not the time to implement significant changes. However, the pressures of the pandemic have undoubtedly strengthened the relationship between the funeral sector and Government, which is, of course, a good thing. We have built on this to support the sector in improving the effectiveness of its self-regulation of quality standards. In our response to the Competition and Markets Authority, we said that we would introduce a set of quality standards and principles to which funeral directors should subscribe. We planned to do so by the end of this year, and to review its effectiveness within 18 months of implementation.