The Good Funeral Guide

The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition

A thoroughly updated and revised edition of the Natural Death Centre‘s celebrated handbook. Now presented alongside a new collection of essays on death, dying and funeral practices by doctors, historians, authors, poets, theologians and artists including Richard Barnett, David Jay Brown, Dr Sheila Cassidy, Charles Cowling, Bill Drummond, Stephen Grasso, Maggi Hambling, Graham Harvey, Gary Lachman, Nick Reynolds, and Dignity in Dying.

It’s out in May 2012!

Image by Sean McManus whose website you can find here.

Hardly anyone buying a funeral pauses to consider whether or not an undertaker is formally trained. Consumers are trusting people. They suppose that he or she is. Well, it ain’t necessarily so.

Training for funeral directors is presently in something of a dark, even unstable, place. The foundation degree course at the University of Bath is to be discontinued. Numbers of applicants for the Diploma in Funeral Directing (Dip Fd) are falling. There’s been a falling out between two providers, the NAFD and the BIFD. The NAFD course is under review. Meanwhile, the independent funeral directors’ trade body SAIF offers some training through its virtual college, the Independent Funeral Directors College.

There’ll never be a consensus about whether or not a Dip FD is worth having; a great many funeral directors reckon not, for reasons good and bad. Some say the training’s not good enough, others that you learn on the job. But an unregulated industry has to look to itself in this matter. If it is to rebuff criticism of its resistance of regulation it needs to demonstrate that regulation is unnecessary. One of the best ways of doing so is to be able to point to high levels of industry training.

As repositories of industry codes of conduct, the NAFD and SAIF might be reckoned to be the best bodies to roll out training courses at all levels. It has been suggested that this is the reverse of truth, but we can’t pin down why. Perhaps someone will tell us.

We have been aware of outsiders surveying the funeral industry recently with an eye to supplying the sort of training that forward-looking funeral directors need. There’s a pretty broad consensus that there is a business opportunity here, with the potential for considerable benefit to the industry. Dip FD courses have been strong on mechanics, less so on those areas of the job requiring emotional intelligence, a quality in greater demand now than ever. We get too many complaints here at the GFG about rotten customer service.  Down at the undertaker’s that becomes ‘total lack of empathy’. We had one on the phone yesterday (complaining about the People’s Undertaker, you guessed). 

Just when we were wondering what would happen next, along comes Green Fuse together with the newly-formed Chester Pearce Associates offering their own Dip FD course. At first glance it looks a bit heavy on mechanics: “Caring for the body and mortuary practice – Removals from different places – Dressing and presenting for viewing – Safe handling and health and safety” but industry insiders will probably reckon these to be hallmarks of credibility. Less reassuring may be that the course is not externally accredited. But Green Fuse has an excellent track record as a training provider with an emphasis on developing emotional intelligence. They are well placed to offer themselves to the industry. If this leads to competition among training providers, that would seem, from the consumer point of view, to be no bad thing. Can’t see the NAFD and SAIF having much time for it. Strategically they need to occupy the high ground; they need to be the go-to people. But Green Fuse has always handled the politics of the industry graciously and with good manners. They have the potential to do well.

Enough from us. Find out more here.

Let us know what you think.

Thanks!

There are lies, damned lies and carbon footprint stats. Their most impressive feature is that they are so often counter-intuitive. Here’s an example:

Researchers at Lincoln University in New Zealand…recently published a study challenging the premise that more food miles automatically mean greater fossil fuel consumption…  [T]hey found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Read on here.

The same sort of statistical sleight of hand can demonstrate that a coffin shipped from the other side of the world racks up the equivalent of no more than half a dozen road miles. Suffering as I do from severe and incurable innumeracy, I am ill-equipped to do more than shrug in puzzlement. I’m hoping you’re rather better than me at this sort of thing, because I’d like to ask your opinion about the following.

The National Association of Funeral Directors (NAFD) has published an article in its journal, the Funeral Director, titled Dispelling the myth about cardboard coffins. It makes this assertion: “Corrugated cardboard coffins may appear to present a green image and are perceived as a low cost alternative to traditional coffins, but in fact they’re not as cheap and environmentally friendly as they look, particularly if they’re made from recycled cardboard.” This dismayed me because I know Will Hunnybel at Greenfield Creations and I’ve always happily reckoned him to be a pretty straight, green sort of guy. The article goes on: “… the overall cost to the planet may be more than that of a solid pine or chipboard veneer coffin.”

That rang an alarm bell. Why would the NAFD’s environmental consultant, Martin Smith, stand a pine coffin alongside a chipboard coffin? Even a dunderhead like my good self knows that a pine coffin is carbon neutral. But what do I know?

Reading further, I find that cardboard coffin makers go about their business is a most beastly, even eco-vindictive, way: “Pine trees, from sustainable forests, provide the basic raw material … the branches are stripped off … torn into small chips and cooked in a solution of”, to cut a long story short, a lot of nasty-sounding chemicals including “sulphates, sulphides and” (can you guess?) “sulphites.”

Bastards, I hear you mutter; all that stripping and tearing and cooking, and sulphates and sulphides and sulphites. Quite so. How unlike the home life of our own, dear chipboard makers. We learn that they do it by much gentler means, “by pressing timber fibres together with glue and heat” employing “fewer chemicals, glues, energy and water than cardboard coffins.”

Friends, am I to remove Will Hunnybel and all other cardboard coffinmakers from my Christmas card list? Was I wrong to suppose that chipboard contains traces of formaldehyde? Is the bottom about to fall out of cardboard coffins?

Do leave a comment, please. This is important.

The funeral industry is right to be wary of those who claim to scrutinise it on behalf of consumers. After all, Jessica Mitford did much injury to the American funeral industry with an exposé which held it up to ridicule and focussed on price at the expense of value, and so was actually of very little use to consumers.

Jessica and her muckraking merrymaking aside, the UK funeral industry was always going to find scrutiny hard to bear both because it is unaccustomed to being held to account and because parts of it  suffer from a degree of complacency, self-importance, even, induced by customers who come through its doors, hold their hands up and say, “Tell me what to do.”

The Good Funeral Guide is guilty of having had some fun at the expense of the funeral industry. Any consumer advocate is going to be adversarial at times, and resolutely non-aligned, of course. And in the interests of readability, this blog aims not to be solemn but challenging, thought-provoking, tail-tweaking, humorous, deadly serious, thoughtful, silly and sometimes downright maverick. Entertaining. If it’s earnest you want, join me at the University of Bath on Saturday for the CDAS annual conference, entitled A Good Send-off. It won’t all be dull. Melissa Stewart of Native Woodland is speaking.

The approach I have taken to the funeral industry is to hold it to account from time to time and, where possible, engage in constructive dialogue. Where the trade bodies, NAFD and SAIF are concerned there has been very little of that. Emails are not replied to or even acknowledged. If this makes me, sometimes, waspish, who’s not to understand?

Yet my main thrust has been not to expose rottenness but to spotlight what’s best in funeral service, to sing the praises of the unsung heroes – to show consumers the way to the good guys so that they needn’t worry themselves about the bad and the awful. Those good guys are invariably independents.

For this reason I tend to be slow to respond to beastly goings on. That’s why, in the matter of Co-operative Funeralcare’s response to the SAIF IPSOS-Mori price comparison survey, I have been slow out of the blocks. I don’t get a bang out of giving Funeralcare a drubbing once in a while. It is a wearisome duty conducted on behalf of funeral consumers, socialism and the ideals of the Rochdale Pioneers.

But this latest business is as bad as it gets.

Even though the SAIF price comparison survey would seem to be 100% quantitative and 0% qualitative, even though it talks about what consumers need to know, SAIF has, along with at least three of its members, in the words of SAIF ceo Alun Tucker, “been issued with papers from the legal team representing The Co-operative Funeralcare. The documents relate to the wording in various items of SAIF literature and the content of some advertisements that members have placed in their local press. I will not comment further at this stage, as we have placed the papers in the hands of solicitors for a response to Funeralcare’s claims.”

I think we all know exactly what we reckon to that. There is no reason to overexcite Co-op lawyers by putting our thoughts into words. Justice is only very, very distantly related to the Law. They hardly ever see each other, never at funerals.

There’s worse. There are allegations from others in the industry that SAIF-affiliated suppliers of merchandise and services are coming under pressure to think carefully about who they do business with – a threat to the viability of SAIF as a trade body. Who is applying this pressure? And, as a writer to SAIF Insight, the trade body’s magazine, says, what if all this were to come into the public domain?

Well, it is in the public domain. And we reckon we know what it’s all about, don’t we? The funeral industry is not a hermetically sealed world like the illegal drugs trade. This is a matter which belongs to wider society; it needs to be aired; it is of material interest to all funeral consumers, the very people the funeral industry and the Good Funeral Guide together seek to serve.

It is because we share this common purpose that I believe we should talk to each other. We won’t always agree, but that’s not the point. So I hope I shall hear soon from spokespeople at SAIF and the NAFD.

My sincere thanks to all those of you who have contacted me with information and told me what you think. Where do we go from here?

If you want to leave a comment, please be very, very careful how you word it.

Co-op lawyers please note: I signed my house over to my wife when I cancelled my smile bank account. I am penniless. (It’s true, too, but I’m throwing it in also for readers who are members of the NAFD. They’ll see the joke.)

Yesterday I reported that rumours are swirling in Funeralland concerning the response of the People’s Undertaker to the release of the IPSOS-Mori funeral price comparison commissioned by the independent funeral directors’ trade association, SAIF — a survey which revealed Co-op charges to be, on average, higher than those in the independent sector despite its enjoyment of significant economies of scale.

I thank all those of you who have contacted me, confidentially, to talk about these rumours.

I am pleased and relieved to be able to report that these rumours are indeed baseless. There have been no instances of heavy-handedness concerning industry suppliers Wilcox Limousines, Lyn Oakes the clothing people, or a leading and excellent firm of funeral directors.

Just as I thought!

No official comment yet from SAIF or the NAFD. But I watch my stats. I know who’s looking. I said to them, when I emailed them yesterday, that I am only doing what any conscientious consumer advocate would do. I’d far rather sing the praises of the best, that’s where my emphasis lies, but I have to maintain an overview.

Sometimes a google goosechase can take you to interesting places.

Where did I start? I wanted to find out the current average price of a simple funeral. I found a Guardian article which concluded with a tranche of good advice from Anne Wadey, author of the Which? publication What To Do When Someone Dies. Which?, we remind ourselves, is a consumer advocacy charity. At the foot of the article was a recommendation (not by Anne Wadey, oh no) of probate specialists Final Duties. Heard of them? You have now. Read this article about them in the Guardian here.

The NAFD has its own pet probate specialist umbrella-ed under its Bereavement Advice Centre (BAC), a not-for-profit organisation. Spin Profiles has this to say about the BAC:

The Bereavement Advice Centre claims to have been welcomed by a variety of organisations from health, funeral, legal and advice sectors and their policy committee oversees development of the service and includes clergy, hospital bereavement support, legal, care home, medical, funeral undertaking and local government representations.

The BAC publishes a leaflet called “What to do when someone dies“, which is widely available in registrars, where people go to register a death, and in some hospitals. The leaflet publicises a helpline which has been accused by solicitors of promoting BAC’s commercial owner ITC Legal Services. An article in the Law Society Gazette in June 2009 drew attention to the “financial links” between the Bereavement Advice Centre and ITC Legal Services. The article says the link has “come under fire from solicitors”. Patricia Wass, a partner at Plymouth firm Foot Anstey and chairwoman of the Law Society’s wills and equity committee, is quoted in the article as saying that she is concerned that registrars ‘up and down the country’ are giving BAC’s leaflets to people when they report a death. This might imply that local authorities sanction BAC’s promotion of ITC’s commercial interests.

Over at Thisismoney, here’s what they have to say on the matter: Registrars, GPs, hospitals, churches and funeral homes are all handing out leaflets advertising the Bereavement Advice Centre. The official-looking document appears to be for a free independent advice service. But those that call a free helpline or visit the website are pointed towards ITC Legal Services, one of the biggest probate providers in the UK. ITC’s fees can be much greater than similar services offered by local solicitors. In one case, a reader was quoted £2,400 by ITC, almost three times more than a local solicitor … Despite claiming its fees are competitive with solicitors and can be half that charged by banks, ITC’s charges can be hugely more expensive than services offered by trained lawyers. This is because the firm charges a percentage of the estate, unlike solicitors, which tend to charge an hourly rate. In Manchester, this ranges between £140 and £250. ITC charges from 2.5% for estates worth between £5,000 and £19,999 to 1% for estates worth £230,000 and above … Stewart Acton, 59, was given one of these leaflets when he went to Sale town Hall to register the death of his mother, Sheila. Thinking it was an official leaflet, he phoned the Bereavement advice centre. Days later, he was visited by a woman from ITC. Mr Acton says: ‘The girl said the firm would take care of everything and that if I went to a solicitor it would take a long time and the costs could be astronomical.’ The charge for ITC’s services was £2,400. Mr Acton got in touch with his neighbour, a solicitor, who said he would charge just £850 for the same service. He says: ‘When your mum dies, your head is in the clouds and you just go with it. These people are just coffin-chasers.’

The Head of the Bereavement Advice Centre is… Anne Wadey. The author of the latest edition of What To Do When Someone Dies would hardly seem to have impeccable non-aligned credentials.

I learnt something else interesting from Spin Profiles: In 2002 Helen Parker, editor of Which, commented: “We want to see all funeral directors in the UK signed up to a standard code of practice. The code should be monitored and enforced by an independent body.” In response, Alan Slater, ceo of the NAFD gave this assurance: “We are currently mid-way through the process of improving our code … Once finalised, the new code will be sent to the OFT.” The NAFD’s Slater said this in 2002. But as of February 2009, the NAFD code of practice has not been approved by OFT. In fact, none of the funeral trades associations’ codes of practice have been approved by OFT. Approval would mean that the codes of practice would be blessed by the Consumer Codes Approval Scheme, offering a much greater degree of assurance to consumers.

In search of better news I googled ITC Legal Services. Has it cleaned its act up? Oh dear, it hasn’t. Here’s a depressing story dated 9 June 2010.

To the consumer, this all looks very murky. I must now fire off emails to the NAFD and SAIF and see what they have to say for themselves.

PS Who is the informant behind these Spin Profiles, I hear you ask? It is none other than the indefatigable Teresa Evans. Hats off, please!