The Good Funeral Guide

The funeral industry is in a bad place. Public reaction to last week’s Which? report revealed few friends. It also showed it to be no good at defending itself.

Things are going to get worse. Time is running out. 

At the GFG we’ve lost count of the number of calls we’ve taken in the last year from TV production companies, in particular, wanting, with one honourable exception, to dig dirt and put the boot in. The bully boys are circling. 

Crisis? Yes, crisis.

Consumers are baffled and angry because there’s no way of knowing who’s good (if any) and who’s not. Poor marketing is a contributory cause. But the most brutal truth of the matter is that the codes of conduct of the industry trade bodies, NAFD and SAIF, simply do not, by themselves, offer consumers quality assurance.

So what’s a good undertaker to do? From time to time, here at the GFG, we like to offer suggestions.

First, the good guys need to hang together and keep the bad eggs out. They can do that in one of two ways. They can form yet another trade body, a selective one. Or they can adopt a different business model.

In the past we’ve looked at the viability of rolling out a really good, proud brand – ‘John Lewis’ funerals. That’s the way for the consolidators to go. Presently, the consolidators are adding zero value to consumers’ experience of a funeral, and short-term value only for their shareholders. Their present way of operating is astoundingly dim.

We’ve also looked at the joint venture model used by Specsavers – here. 

Another model that funeral directors might like to consider is the Best Western model.

It’s a clever and an attractive way of doing things – a collaborative way of doing things. Best Western is an organisation which provides back office roles, marketing, reservations and operational support, to over 4,000 hotels in 80 countries worldwide. Best Western doesn’t own any of these hotels; each one is independent. It’s a chain, but it’s not a chain. You get the best of both worlds: all the warmth and individuality of an independent hotel, and all the assurance of quality standards which all hotels have to meet.

It’s not an orthodox franchise operation where both franchisor and franchisee operate for profit. Best Western is a non-profit membership operation which works, democratically, as near as dammit as a co-op, one member, one vote. Membership is renewed annually.

Re-read the last two paragraphs substituting ‘funeral director’ for ‘hotel’ and you begin see how easily this model could adapt to the funeral industry.

Here at the GFG we do not feel a sense of responsibility to save the funeral industry. Our focus is the best interests of consumers. Good funeral directors collaborating effectively to keep each other up to the mark and get the message out would help a lot. 

It is high time they got their act together. 

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!

Here’s an interesting article from the Milton Keynes Citizen which describes a Trading Standards department that sets the pace for some of the rest:

Milton Keynes Council Trading Standards has recently undertaken a project looking at the funeral directors industry to determine if businesses are compliant with consumer protection legislation. 

The trade within Milton Keynes consists of five single branch independents, three independents with more than one place of business and one larger company, in addition to the Muslim funeral service that is arranged through the local Mosque.

Of these 40 per cent belong to one or both of the funeral trade associations, either the National Association of Funeral Directors (NAFD), or the National Society of Allied and Independent Funeral Directors (SAIF).

In relation to disclosing business names 50 per cent were compliant with the legislation. Those that were not compliant failed to display either the registered name in relation to a limited company, or its business name and address in relation to an individual or partnership.

In one instance, where the registered name was not displayed it would have indicated that the business was actually owned by a large company with 30 branches under different business names across the South of England, rather than the perception given of it being an independent funeral director.

The use of small business names by the larger companies suggests that they are implying they are independent funeral directors when in fact they are not.

When questioned one larger company stated that the independent name had been kept as a business name due to the high regard in which the original company had been held locally.

In relation to pricing, 90 per cent of the funeral directors were compliant with the legislation where applicable.

Those funeral directors belonging to one or both of the trade associations’ offer, in line with the associations codes of practice, a ‘simple’ or ‘basic’ funeral service. Included in the price of this service is the cost of the coffin and no coffin options are available.

However, where a more bespoke service is offered with multiple coffin options then a price list was available.

Only one company did not have a price list for the coffin options.

Advice was given in relation to the descriptions of coffins to one company because in the descriptions of the two lower end price options, the cheapest coffin was described as being constructed from paper and the next, and more expensive as ‘wood veneer’, yet both were made of the same construction, merely a different patterned covering.

Two companies described ‘embalming’ as ‘hygienic treatment’ which they stated was an industry standard description. However, although this term was known by the other businesses in Milton Keynes only two businesses used this type of description for embalming. One company stated that although this description is used on their paperwork it is verbally made clear what this treatment is, and neither one offered or carried out the treatment on a regular basis.

One company however, have their own embalmer who carries out over 400 embalmings per year across two geographical areas, including Milton Keynes.

None of the other funeral directors carried out more than 1 or 2 embalmings per year.

In relation to advising customers of their right to cancel the contract, if the contract was signed in the home, only 30% were compliant with the legislation.

All of the businesses who were non-compliant undertook to make changes to become compliant with the relevant legislation and two have successfully applied to become trading standards approved on the Council’s Buy with Confidence scheme.

Karen Ford, head of trading standards in Milton Keynes states: “It is concerning that so many non-compliances were detected but I am reassured things will be put right.

“What is more concerning is the rate of embalmings, which are not always a necessary treatment. My advice to consumers, during one of the most difficult periods in their life, is to ensure they are still getting a fair deal by getting a full breakdown of costs and not to be pressured into paying for something that is not necessary.”

Karen Ford also said: “We are delighted that HW Mason & Sons and Finch & Sons have been accepted onto the Buy With Confidence scheme. Our consumers can now make their choice knowing that at least two local businesses will comply with trading laws and treat their customers fairly.”

We wondered if we detected the hand of Teresa Evans in this. We asked her. No, not directly, she says. But we suppose that Teresa has somewhat raised awareness of consumer protection in the matter of funerals in what is now her home town. She says: “I have written to the Chief Executive of the Trading Standards Institute on a number of occasions calling for a campaign to raise funeral consumer awareness. I didn’t even receive an acknowledgement, so I was quite surprised to learn about this recent project.”

When Teresa writes to you, you know you’ve been written to, whether you reply or not. And she’s not letting it rest there, oh no, not Teresa. She is now in the process of firing off a Freedom of Information request to Trading Standards demanding the names of those firms of undertakers who were inspected and found wanting. 

Find Teresa Evans’ website here. 

Full text of the article in the Milton Keynes Citizen here. 

Okay then, what’s so what’s our line on the latest media coverage of Funeralworld sparked by the ‘consumer advocacy organisation’ Which? deploring mendacious, predatory funeral directors?

All the age-old charges are levelled against funeral directors: opaque pricing, upselling, and talking people into services they don’t need like embalming. Out of 20 funeral directors mystery shopped by Which? the advice offered by 14 was rated poor or very poor.

This is what we think.

First, consumers have a duty to prepare, in advance of any commercial transaction they enter into, by informing themselves and shopping around. Funerals are no different. Perhaps they should be, but just now this is the way we do things, so tough. Buying a funeral is no different from buying a fridge. Or, perhaps more appropriately, a second-hand car. The first rule of capitalism is never give a sucker an even break.

Second, Which? has a very poor claim to be a consumer advocate in the area of funerals. Why? Because the Which? guide What To Do When Someone Dies is written by an funeral industry insider. That insider is Anne Wadey. Anne Wadey heads up the Bereavement Advice Centre, which is financed by the Independent Trust Corporation (ITC), a probate specialist, and sponsored by the NAFD. ITC’s reputation is deplorable. Have a look at the Review Centre website here. The latest review (12.12.2011) begins: “ITC Legal Services _ Never consider using them!” Please anyone out there contemplating using this firm for probate work, don’t don’t don’t! They are complete charlattans who lull you into a false sense of security that they will support you during a time of need and are actually only after fleecing the estate of your loved one. They have upset me so badly, I feel unable to even telephone them and consider taking them to court for misrepresentation is the only way forward.

We first looked at ITC in June 2010. If you’d like more detail, click here.

Third, this so-called survey by Which? is irresponsibly sensation seeking. Sure, they “applaud the examples of empathy and good practice we did see” – but there’s no reference to this in the Daily Mail report.

The effect is to tar all funeral directors with the same brush. This is terribly unfair.

Here at the GFG we are no strangers, obviously, to vile service from lying, cheating bastards trading as funeral directors.

We are also aware that some of the nicest, kindest, most principled people you could ever hope to meet also trade as funeral directors.

If Which? wanted to do consumers a service, this is what they would have said. They would have said that the good news is that anyone, anywhere, can find an ethical, golden-hearted funeral director who’ll look after them wonderfully well.

But they didn’t. They chose to stir the shit to get themselves a bit of cheap publicity.

And our completely crap media fell for it.

Daily Mail story here

Daily Telegraph story here 

The guys and gals at Eulogy Magazine have run rather a good story to earth and, in the process, attracted a libel threat from the Sue Ryder charity, which they have responded to by proclaiming it in a press release. Nice one, bredren!

At the beginning of 2011, Eulogy discovered that Sue Ryder and King’s Court Trust (KCT), a little known and unregulated probate firm, were in the process of developing a commercial partnership called, ‘Services for Bereavement’ 

On Friday 11th March 2011, Christine Houghton, Marketing Director of KCT told us, “Sue Ryder will be giving us a list of their patients to work from. Obviously we can’t be seen to be ‘ambulance chasing’, which is why Services for Bereavement is important.” 

Concerned with the way such a proposal might contravene data protection laws, we asked Sue Ryder for clarification. They denied any agreement to share data with KCT, but refused to explain how the company was led to believe that they would be given a list of patients. 

Whetted your appetite? Read the whole sorry mess here.

Here’s a strange tale.

Daniel Brennan died in Monklands Hospital, Airdrie, and was looked after  Donald McLaren Ltd, est 1912. I don’t know if there was a post mortem, but we are told that Daniel’s illness was a short one.

When Daniel’s mother went to see him at the funeral home she was appalled:

“I pulled the shroud back and saw him in a body bag and covered in blood and fluid going from one shoulder to another. The smell was atrocious. His face and neck were swollen and bruised beyond recognition and I can assure you that when I left my son at the hospital, his face was in no way disfigured or marked. I was totally shocked at the state of my son’s body. It was horrific. I’ll never get the picture out of my head.” [Source]

Mrs Brennan has filed a complaint with the NAFD. It looks as if the undertaker has waived the embalming fee.

I don’t get it. Why on earth did the undertaker allow the family see Daniel looking like that? Any undertakerly insights welcome.

A couple of months ago I was tipped off that the oft-disgraced Richard Sage was alive, well and practising in Burnley, Lancashire in the guise of J Kendal at this address:

40 Briercliffe Road, Burnley BB10 1XB

I followed this up and discovered it to be so.

Don’t know who Richard Sage is? Google him.

At the same time, I was looking into the activities of Nationwide Funerals. I posted a piece on the blog drawing attention to the similarity of their offer to that of Richard Sage’s other operation, Direct Funeral Services,  and the perils generally of being an internet undertaker in the wake of Sage. I wrote and asked for Nationwide’s comments. I received a very cross email saying, among other things:

‘you will understand our dissapointment in your post and the damaging non substantiated comments about a Mr Sage who we have researched since your posting. We are disgusted that this name is even on the same page as our company.’

I took the blog post down in a spirit of friendly dialogue while I tried to find out more about a company which can do you a funeral for £970 plus disbursements. I was disappointed in my attempts to get Nationwide to talk to me. I got this:

‘I apologies for your dissapointment, however please understand a new company dealing with many customers needs to concentrate on its services it is providing and cannot prioritise trade and bloggers enquiries. Your request should be actioned when we have the time.’

I rang and rang, then let it go. I posted a warning on my website.

I had been told by a person claiming to have been employed by Mr Sage that the owner of Nationwide, Aidan Cabrera Moreno, was living at Mr Sage’s address. (This same person, who alleged that he had been a victim of Mr Sage, also told me he reckons Mr Moreno to be a nice guy.) Today I received another tip-off from someone who has been investigating Nationwide Funerals at Companies House. It was the missing link. It turns out that Nationwide Funerals is registered at this address:

40 Briercliffe Road, Burnley, BB10 1XB

Funeral directors who read this blog will be wondering who the funeral director is in the handsome video on the Nationwide website. You can find him here.

What are the industry’s trade bodies, NAFD and SAIF doing about this, I wonder. I shall write and ask them.

I am aware of no malpractice on the part of Nationwide Funerals who have now expanded to the London area.

Jonathan Taylor, the mercurial genius who from time to time gilds this dull little blog with his inspired intelligence, glorious whimsy and beauty of spirit, once observed that the time between death and the funeral gives people the time to get the heads around the difference between ‘you and it’ – between a living person and a dead thing from which the spirit (if any) has flown.

For many professionals working at the interface between life and death, ‘it-ness’ can happen pretty fast. “That’s not a person, it’s a thing.” There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that – so long as it isn’t attended by a coarsening of the emotions which manifests as cruelty or carelessness.

It can happen. This is from yesterday’s Birmingham Post.

Birmingham’s largest hospital trust has launched an investigation into its private porter services after dead bodies were left for hours on wards.

Lung patient Sarah Stevenson, from Small Heath, described in March the “horrendous stench” she was forced to endure on Ward 9 at Heartlands after three patients died on the same day and they were not removed for hours.

Whistleblower David Whitsey, a porter at the hospital for nine years … claimed lack of training led to the body of patient Dora Parker, aged 81, from Kitts Green, being dropped while lifted on to a trolley shortly after she died in 2003, causing a gash on her head to the shock of daughter-in-law Patricia Parker.

Read the whole sorry story here. (Hat-tip to Tony Piper for this)

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.)

Terrific tale here from Poland of warring undertakers bribing doctors and paramedics to kill patients and deliver them to the funeral home of the highest bidder. It’s reckoned that the number of murdered patients may be 20,000.

It lasts over an hour, it’s gripping stuff and it’s beautifully filmed.

Are there funeral directors in the UK who have connections with local hospitals? Local nursing homes? Is there the potential here for backhanders and skulduggery? Where did that lovely new telly in the day centre come from?

Do we have a problem? Anonymous comments welcome (but not lurid and lunatic allegations).