From the Evening Standard:
Dignity, the funeral care specialist, has again shown there is only one line of work guaranteed to be recession-proof: death.
The group increased the number of funerals it performed to 63,200 last year as it benefited from a rise in deaths in Britain to 551,000.
This helped Dignity, the UK’s only-listed funeral care operator, post a 13% rise in full-year pre-tax profits to £45.4 million, with revenues up 9% to £229.6 million, driven by its raising the average cost of a funeral to £3500.
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David Holmes
Thursday 7th March 2013 at 6:38 pm
Rejoice! Independent family funeral directors should celebrate this news.
If Dignity Plc are charging an average £3,500 for a funeral, and our friends at Funeralcare are not far behind them, then these giants are setting the price of a funeral in Britain.
Many independent’s around the country will be charging a few hundred pounds less than this figure – which whatever way you look at it, still seems like an an extraordinarily large sum of money, for doing what is involved in most UK funerals?
I predict changes ahead.
Andrew Hickson
Friday 8th March 2013 at 9:21 am
Agreed David. And for ‘a few hundred’ substitute ‘over a thousand’ in quite a few cases!