For 15 years QSA has sought to respond to the injustice of funeral poverty. Alongside providing extensive digital resources and direct support through a UK-wide funeral cost advice service, our Down to Earth project is also committed to policy and influencing work. This has included providing detailed evidence and insight to the Competition and Market’s Authority’s (CMA’s) funeral industry investigation through 2018 to 2021.
Widely recognised as a leading authority on funeral poverty, QSA has now contributed to the ongoing Fuller Inquiry. The inquiry was set up in January 2022 to investigate the crimes of David Fuller in mortuaries at an NHS Trust. This includes reviewing within the NHS what procedures could be put in place to ensure better protection of the deceased in future. The case also raises questions concerning the lack of regulation of the funeral industry. Down to Earth’s co-manager Lindesay Mace has submitted a statement along with anonymised case examples as evidence for consideration by the inquiry.
Summary of Quaker Social Action’s Statement the Fuller Inquiry
“We hugely welcome the Fuller Inquiry’s interim report and its recommendations. We have been calling for full-scale regulation of the at-need funeral industry for many years and believe it is urgently needed. It was deeply concerning to read that 55 per cent of funeral organisations that responded to the Inquiry’s questionnaire reported that no changes had been made in response to the Fuller case and that, of those, 40 per cent stated that they did not consider changes were necessary. We would just like to reflect that, while compliance with the CMA is improving, a striking 16% of funeral director companies who were required to provide revenue information to the CMA for their 2024 Review of market outcomes did not do so. Meanwhile, in that review, 10% were shown to be non-compliant with the transparency requirements, over two years after they came into force. All this suggests there is a proportion of the sector that still thinks it is above scrutiny. Self-regulation, or even a co-regulatory approach as suggested by the previous government, is not sufficient.
Lack of regulation can put people who are financially vulnerable at greater risk. People who are struggling with the finances for a funeral are sometimes turned away by funeral directors because they are worried that person won’t pay their bill. This places them in a more vulnerable position when they do find a funeral director who says they will help them, including potentially feeling a heightened level of gratitude towards that funeral director, which could make it less likely they would question their conduct if needed. Previous research of ours found that bereaved people place a huge amount of trust in their funeral director anyway.
Meanwhile, the combination of funeral poverty and many funeral companies wanting payment upfront, sometimes before they will carry out any work, can lead to significant delays, including in collecting the deceased person or preparing them for a viewing. Delays can cause difficulties for funeral directors, hospitals and coroner mortuaries, for example regarding storage capacity for bodies. We are concerned that people experiencing funeral poverty, and the person who has died, could be at greater risk of harm as a result of these delays. We appreciate that funeral companies are businesses and must be paid for the work they do, but the reality is that thousands of people do not have the required money upfront.
Finally, we would like to echo what one attendee at a London seminar said, that funeral directors are ‘also looking after people who are arranging funerals who themselves might be in a vulnerable position for all sorts of reasons’. While most funeral directors provide a very caring service to their bereaved customers, we know this is not always the case. It is crucial that any regulation and code of conduct also covers care of the bereaved, specifically including those who are financially vulnerable.”