The wages of solicitude

We worry about our football clubs. Many are encumbered by stonking debts. Manchester United owes £716 million.

What of our big undertaking businesses? Well, Dignity Caring Funeral Services has just published figures which provide the current answer to that question. And the answer is (sit down, please, and clutch your whisky) that Dignity are leveraged to the tune of £250 million.

Bad news: in 2009 they performed 3,700 fewer funerals than in 2008.

Good news: profits rose 6 per cent to £37.5 million.

Bad news: price per funeral rose by 6 per cent.

Good news: shareholder payouts are up by 10 per cent.

Conclusion: caring for investors, crapping on consumers.

The Co-operative reports 21% increase in funeral plan sales

No funeral director, however brilliant, can stimulate an appetite for their product – because we pass their way but once. But a funeral director can sign up tomorrow’s customers today by the ingenious means of selling them a pre-need funeral plan.

Pre-need plans look like a very good bet. They’re inflation-proof. And they are easy to sell. Just tweak people’s consciences by telling them that it’s a helpful and thoughtful thing to do for those who will be charged with disposing of you and you’ve got a win-win-win.

The Co-operative Group and Dignity, in particular, have done an incredibly good job of selling their pre-need plans. So much so that the independent sector is finding that tomorrow’s market increasingly belongs to these big conglomerates. As turf wars go, this one is looking very one-sided.

The more so with the Co-op’s proclamation on 5 March of a staggering 21 per cent growth in sales of pre-need plans in 2009. If I were an independent I’d be writing off my future.

Are pre-need plans the best way of paying for a funeral? I haven’t the financial literacy to work that out. I wonder if any reader of this blog has a view or, better still, an analysis.

What is certain is that consumer choice is under grave threat from funeral providers who, for the most part, cannot rival independents for personal service or value for money.

Read the incredibly depressing Co-op announcement here.

Take it to them!

It's widely known in the funeral business that the prices charged by Co-operative Funeralcare and Dignity are on the whole higher than those charged by their independent competitors - the family businesses and new start-ups - so many of them passionate ex-Funeralcare employees who tell me they learned everything about what not to do at Funeralcare.

Funeral consumers don't know about this. They don't do price comparison shopping. And considering most of them buy just two funerals in their lifetime, and most of them don't have any recently comparable experience, they just assume hopefully that the prices charged by everyone are about the same. They assume that Funeralcare, with its ethical trumpeting and working class roots in will be on their side.

Caveat emptor! And here let's exonerate Dignity. Dignity's in it for the money. It's making lots. Well done, chaps! Don't necessarily like you for it, but realise that the rules of the game are capitalism, and that you play hard and, er, fair.

Why do so many independents moan about the higher prices charged by the big boys yet do nothing to get the message out? Because it would look undignified? I don't know that it would look less dignified than boasting about how cheap your low-cost funeral is as you do at the moment in your coded way.

In Nottingham, the eminently respectable and excellent AW Lymn make no secret of their competitive pricing structure. They break it down and spell it out graphically. Way to go, I'd reckon.

I'm grateful to blog follower Andrew Plume for this intelligence. Thank you, Andrew.

Go to the AW Lymn website. Click on the package prices pdf at the foot of the page, right-hand side.

The Bill

As the new year comes storming out of the blocks, so does the Good Funeral Guide, cheeks flushed by a few days in its rocky, island holiday home. So too does Reaper G, of course, for this is his busy time of the year. No seasonal best wishes for you, you pale loiterer. But to all readers of this blog, may I extend my best wishes for a terrific year of unalloyed happiness and uninterrupted success. Go forth and gather it in.

To start us off, here’s a guest post from David Barrington, a funeral director in Liverpool. His beef is with the high prices charged by the big funeral chains. Thank you, David.

As an independent funeral director I take pride in the fact that I offer a caring and personal service at what I hope is a fair price. My firm is not the cheapest in my area but it is also far and away not the most expensive; that particular honour goes to the larger companies. And that is the subject of this post. Why in the funeral business does the opposite happen to other sectors of the economy?

In most areas the general rule of thumb is that if you are a very large company you can use economies of scale to ensure that your charges are lower than your competitors’.

So hypothetically if a company did let’s say 10,000 funerals a year, then you would pretty much imagine that they would have the buying power to keep their costs down.

Why then do the two large companies near to me offer a simple funeral service for over £500 more than I can? That is for a no frills service as specified by the National Association of Funeral Directors (NAFD) Code of practice. Once you start adding in extras like limousines, better coffins, etc, the gap grows astonishingly.

But what is more astonishing is that families go back to them without getting other quotes to see how much other funeral directors are or what sort of service they offer in comparison. One of the main aims of the bigger companies is to reduce the market share of the independent sector. If they succeed in this then there will be no incentive to keep prices down.

Now, bearing that in mind if you went into a funeral directors to make funeral arrangements and told the arranger you were looking for quotes from other funeral directors. If that arranger then told you to go to the other funeral directors and get a written estimate from them and they would match the new price or alternatively go £50 lower, how would you feel?

How can a company take that much off their price without compromising the quality of service provided? Would you feel you were getting a better deal or would you ask how they can manage to cut the price by that much and still provide the same quality of service? And what of the families who don't shop around?

Is it really acceptable in a caring profession to ask a family who is in a vulnerable and emotional state to go shopping round funeral companies? Wouldn't it be better to be able to justify the price you charge and stick to it?

We are not selling washing machines or televisions, we are offering a service that celebrates a person’s life. It is so important that the funeral director you choose empathises with you, offers you choice in the service that you want and a fair price.

A happy and healthy new year to you all.

David.

Vast cars

What is this thing with undertakers and their hearses and limousines? Are we talking customer focus here, or idolatry? I really don’t know the answer—I mean that.

As the UN climate talks in Copenhagen reach their climax, and at a time when people are finding it more and more difficult to stump up the cost of a funeral, the People’s Undertaker in Coventry has just taken delivery of two Jaguar hearses and a limousine at around £90,000 each. What’s the depreciation on one of those? Ten grand a year?

I’m not sure that Darryl Smith, general manager of funerals at the Heart of England Co-op, knows what they are all about, either. But here’s his rationale: “This substantial level of investment clearly demonstrates the Society’s philosophy of being at the heart of the community as well our ongoing commitment to providing a first class service to our clients and offering them the ultimate in style and comfort.”

How bonkers is that? Or not bonkers, as the case may be? I am conflicted. Let’s try it for size. I go out and buy an inordinately expensive, fuel-hungry motorcar which will stretch the family budget no end and bugger up the climate bigtime, which is why everyone else is buying smaller, fuel-efficient cars. I drive home and issue this statement from, I don’t know, my doorstep, perhaps: “This substantial level of investment clearly demonstrates my philosophy of being at the heart of the community as well my ongoing commitment to providing a first class service to my good lady wife and her beautiful children, offering them the ultimate in style and comfort.”

You be the judge. My mind is entirely open. Does a nice motorcar a good funeral make? Two schools of thought, perhaps.

The photo at the top is of the headstone of a murdered member of the Lithuanian mafia, not a funeral director. Or is it the other way around? Sorry, I’ve lost the caption.

Do, please, take issue with me. At this very dull time of the year an honest blogger must lob a few extra chillis into the mix.

Period piece

Jessica Mitford

Back in 1995 the funeral industry had been in a state of low level excitement and terror for some fifteen years. Conglomerates were stalking the land, seeking whom they might devour. Their talk of economies of scale made perfectly good sense. The little old family firms looked a bit like polar bears today.

One of the leading figures in the early days of the buying spree was the flash, narcissistic Howard Hodgson. In those get-filthy-rich-quick, Thatcherite days, he got filthy rich quick, sold out, picked up £7m and ever after enjoyed a life of relative unsuccess, poor man (I’m being careful here in case his lawyer’s reading).

The conglomerates are still with us, of course. Dignity. Funeralcare. Laurel. Others. And they’re still at it, borrowing lots of money, buying out whoever they can. But they aren’t the future. For all the efficiencies they can bring they’ve got loans to service. They’ve never managed to sell a cheaper funeral. Far from it, they’re normally more expensive. And they’re not very good at it, either.

The conglomerate which spread most terror was the US group Service Corporation International, an enterprise with global ambitions whose levels of competence continue to dump it in scandal. SCI was compelled to retreat from the UK. Its operation was bought out by Dignity.

With its departure receded fears of the Americanisation of UK funerals. But when the fear was at its height Channel 4 ran a documentary, Over My Dead Body, which, though only fifteen years old, now looks startlingly dated. Of historical interest are appearances by the twerp Hodgson and also Jessica Mitford. She it was who, in her American Way of Death, trashed the US funeral business with a combination of mischievous mockery and British values. For all the good she may have done, it is Ms Mitford whom we must hold to blame for mistaking price for value and perpetrating the notion that, in the matter of funerals, the only good un’s a cheap un.

Want to see the documentary? It’s great, let me tell you. You’ll have to give it some time to download, so find something else to do while it does. Go for it. Click here.

Priceless

There’s an interesting letter in this month’s Funeral Service Times from a funeral director, Brian Howard. Actually, it’s more of a suicide note, but we’ll come to that. He’s fed up with people ordering funerals they can’t pay for, or for which their dead people did not make any provision. “In our experience,” he says, “nearly every unpaid funeral is a claim from the social funeral fund DWP [Department for Work and Pensions], but unfortunately because of the data protection act the DWP will not discuss a claim or inform the funeral directors of a problem even though the cheques are made payable to us and we have paid for the funeral on behalf of the claimant.”

When someone who’s skint comes to buy a funeral, the funeral director advises them to apply to the social fund. You’ve got to be completely skint to qualify for a funeral payment from the social fund. You have to fill out a long form. It takes them several weeks to decide if you’re worth it. The sum it pays out is likely to be less than the cost of even a basic funeral. Some funeral directors will not arrange the funeral until they can be sure the funding is in place. Most go ahead and keep their fingers crossed.

Until the last few years, funeral directors displayed low aggression in pursuing bad payers, thinking it would damage their image if they did. They’re now going after them with a vengeance. They have to. There’s a cashflow-threatening amount of money at stake.

Gone are the days of two months’ free credit at the expense of the funeral director. Almost all now demand payment of disbursements upfront. Disbursements are the bills from service and merchandise providers the funeral director pays on your behalf.

Something that really bugs Mr Howard is this: “At present any member of the public can walk into [their local authority] bereavement services and purchase a burial plot, cremation, or cremation plot at the same price as a funeral director. And yet if we are not paid for the funeral we still have to pay the local authority, and the applicant receives the deeds in their name ... It appears that we are actually retailing burial plots and cremation service/plots for the local authority, and if this is the case then we should have a mark-up price – at least this would give us a margin of profit to offset non-payment.”

Here is his radical remedy: “I propose that the local authority invoice the applicant for burial plots, cremation plots and cremations, or alternatively stay with the present system, but if we do not receive payment by the time the fees are due we obtain credit from the local authority. They have the machinery in place for debt recovery.”

We can sympathise with Mr Howard—up to a point. But we reflect that funeral directors have worked very hard to be indispensable: to be the sole gateway to all funereal merchandise and service providers. Their business model and their prestige require them to be a one-stop shop for everything a bereaved person needs. They pride themselves on doing everything for their clients, lifting the weight and worry of arranging the funeral off their shoulders. Their message to clients is that of Bob Marley: Don’t worry about a thing / Cos ev’ry little thing gonna be all right. And while this may seem to be very helpful, it is also very controlling and disempowering, both of their clients and their service providers. The Good Funeral Guide believes that the bereaved need to engage with funeral arrangements in a much more hands-on way; that, to paraphrase Beth Knox, once a person is dead the worst thing possible has happened: everything you can do from then on can only make things better. The more you do the better you’ll grieve at the best time for grieving.

Funeral directors have established a stranglehold over funeral arrangements, and this has come back and bitten them on the bum. Local authorities have become lazily dependent on funeral directors to collect their fees. There is no good reason why they shouldn’t collect their own fees from purchasers of graves and cremations. Why on earth don’t they? Because the funeral directors fall over themselves to do it for them. Mr Howard claims that “It appears that we are actually retailing burial plots and cremation service/plots for the local authority, and if this is the case then we should have a mark-up price – at least this would give us a margin of profit to offset non-payment.” No, Mr Howard. You are not a retailer, you are an agent. You make a charge for this in your professional fee.

Local authorities have also become lazily dependent on indispensable funeral directors to arrange for the disposal of dead bodies. The option which is never presented to people is that of refusing to accept responsibility. Citizens Advice gives wrong advice in this matter: “Some people do not leave enough money to pay for even a simple funeral. If this happens, the person arranging the funeral will have to pay for it.” No! Under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, the responsibility for the disposal of dead bodies lies with the local authority. Anyone is perfectly entitled to walk away from the whole business. It was, therefore, perfectly logical for the government in the 1950s to consider nationalising the funeral industry, and for the same reason it is arguable that it was wrong to abolish the death grant. If more skint people walked away from arranging funerals, or more funeral directors refused to have anything to do with them, the government would very adroitly speed up social fund payments.

Mr Howard concludes by sounding a warning to his fellow funeral directors: “As the wording on the burial purchase forms and application for cremation forms suggests that it is the applicant’s purchase and not the funeral director’s, unless we demand a change in the future the DIY service will be commonplace.” In other words, people will become their own funeral directors. We’re all doomed!

Here Mr Howard betrays a misunderstanding of his role—a misunderstanding possibly brought about by his job title. Were he to revert to the time-honoured title of undertaker he’d be able to see his role more clearly. When people take upon themselves the responsibility for disposing of their dead they make themselves accountable in law to their local authority and they cannot shift that legal responsibility to anyone else. They can, though, depute the care of their dead person to someone who will undertake to do that—someone who will also undertake to make funeral arrangements on their behalf as instructed. The local authority is in charge. The executor or administrator is the possessor of the body, the funeral director. The undertaker is custodian and agent, merely.

If funeral directors have become victims of their own self-inflicted indispensability, that is their fault. There are a great many coffin makers, florists, caterers, printers and secular celebrants who will greet this with a smirk. They’d be very happy to deal with the public direct. Coffin makers in particular would be happy to see their coffins sold at a far less exorbitant markup.

Mr Howard, I think you are going to have to bite the bullet on this one. It is industrious indispensability that maintains your pre-eminence. The price you pay is the odd unpaid bill. It’s worth it. If all providers of services and merchandise start to invoice funeral consumers direct, you unravel; you fall apart. Shh. Your letter exposes the extreme fragility of the funeral director’s business model.

To JH: if you will give me a good email address I want to reply to you.

Bad moon rising?

An interesting thing about undertaking is that you don’t have to come at it from a position of actually being an undertaker. Does that make no sense? Let me explain.

I know how undertakers feel. I am a writer. It is very difficult to come at writing from the position of being a writer. My good friend Christopher is a writer. He wrote a very successful book. Nigel Slater, Monty Don and Anna Pavord raved about it. Result? Penury. Very few writers strike lucky enough to make a living from writing (though their agents and publishers do well enough out of them). They need to do other things. If Christopher wants to finish his next book (it’s about forests and promises to be just as brilliant as Forgotten Fruits) he needs to broaden his earning base, bustle a bit, do some journalism or copywriting, a few shifts pushing trolleys at B&Q, a newspaper round, whatever. A bit on the side. I once did time in prison. As a teacher. It was quite a good little earner—until I was sacked. I am now an occasional funeral celebrant. It keeps my financial scoreboard ticking over. But it keeps me from my writing. There’s no winning combination.

Just about everyone else can make a living by pursuing single-issue careers, lucky people. Surgeons. Electricians. Brazilian waxers. Dog groomers. They don’t need their bit on the side.

Undertakers began as portfolio workers. They were builders or joiners. Undertaking was a sideline. Nowadays, though they are undertakers first and foremost, they still can’t make a living out of it, dammit. No, they need their bit on the side, too. So they have to work hard to make themselves indispensable in all areas of funeral planning—to be a one-stop shop for everything you need. Which is why they collect fees on behalf of crematoriums, priests, celebrants and burial grounds, making themselves responsible for the debts of their clients. Desperate lunacy! It is why they have to hold all service and merchandise providers, people who do things they can’t, in hired dependency. Thrall is all.

It’s a terribly delicate business model and it can so easily fall apart. Why? Because undertaking is so easily relegated to an ancillary service. Because there’s so little to it. Result? Hirer hired. Anyone can set themselves up as a funeral arranger and turn the tables—a monumental mason, a celebrant, an event organiser.

Is it all unravelling for the funeral directors? Not necessarily. But they need to smarten up, definitely. Old school funeral directors have failed to address the disconnect between the care of the body and the creation of the funeral ceremony. For most, these remain separate specialisms—and where clients want a religious ceremony they’ll always be so. But the rise of the secular ceremony gives a funeral director the opportunity to offer exactly what their clients want: a joined up service. Most are intellectually incapable of this.

Down in Devon, green fuse hire mortuary facilities from local funeral directors, where they care for the bodies entrusted to them. Family Tree and the Green Funeral Company, both of whom have their own mortuaries, are also rare, triumphant exceptions, the best it gets—but, like my friend Christopher, I don’t suppose they’ll ever be troubling the financial services industry. They are content in their honourable estate of relative poverty, happy in their own skins, terrifically nice people.

Funeral directors live in ever-present danger of someone better coming along and enslaving them. And the news is that their newest threat has arrived. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for: the funeral consultant!

I have been contacted by two such in the last month, both of them ex-funeral directors who can use their insider knowledge to muscle down prices for their clients. One is Andrew Hickson at Your Choice Funerals. I won’t tell you who the other one is until he has got his website sorted.

Will the news of their advent cause the marmalade to drop from the nerveless fingers of breakfasting funeral directors the length and breadth of the land?

There's always going to be a market for a cheaper funeral . But my feeling is that people are going to be reluctant to accede to the care of their dead person being subordinated in any way. What do you think?

While you consider, go straight to Amazon and order your copy of Forgotten Fruits.

Local hero

In the matter of household shopping we look back nostalgically to the high street of yesteryear. Ah, those were the days. The butcher, the baker, the grocer. Ooh, hello, Postman Pat! In every shop a cheery greeting. And great personal service.

Gone. For ever. Whatever happened to them?

You bankrupted them. Yes, you.

You trooped off to the unloveable supermarket, didn’t you, where the food is fresher, the choice greater, the prices lower? Sure, the experience is impersonal, but does that bother you? No. You can look after yourself, thank you very much.

Small may be beautiful but bigger is better. Beastly it may be, but biggest is best.

Affordability is the critical factor here. Yes, a handbuilt car is the one you’d like. In your dreams. Back here on earth, c’mon let’s get grounded, the mass produced car is the one you can afford.

Funerals are no exception. You don’t want a production line funeral. You don’t want to be borne to your final resting place by Tesco. You don’t want to deal with a faceless organisation. You’d rather interact with humans who seem to care about you, have time for you, people who answer to you, not their line manager.

You want a bespoke, handbuilt, boutique funeral. Because small is beautiful.

And here we come to one of the great paradoxes of the funeral industry:

You can have one!

Any business which can reduce its unit price can make itself more affordable. Any undertaking enterprise that can open a few branches, share a car pool, operate a central mortuary, drive deals with coffin makers and other suppliers and work its employees to death, can, according to the immutable laws of business, do it cheaper. Obviously.

But they don’t.

In fact, a handbuilt funeral, a boutique undertaker, is likely to cost you considerably less than one of the big chains.

Whaa?! Why do they charge more?

Because they can. Because they’re greedy.

If you’re not going to compete on price, what’s left? Service, of course. But service, as we know, consumes time. It is the first victim of economies of scale. That doesn’t matter a bit if you’re buying your groceries. But when you buy a funeral, it's service that matters most.

And it’s because the big chains of funeral directors, most of them, can’t offer what most people want most—service—that they’ve got nothing to boast about. So, when they buy up a small, independent undertaker, they don’t put a huge poster in the window proclaiming UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT! Oh no. They go on sort of pretending to be the little guy they bought out. Are they ashamed to confess who they are? You answer that. Is this practice a bit shady? The judgement is entirely yours.

Can’t be too careful in my business. I used to hold the romantic notion that the law was all about justice until a property developer, enraged by my naïveté, told me it was all about intimidation. “You hire the most expensive barrister you can afford and you bloody well terrify the living s**t out of them!” he yelled patiently. He did it a lot. The yelling, too. He drove a handbuilt car.

Down in Sandhurst, Berkshire, Holmes and Sons, Funeral Directors, are keen to point out to their customers the difference between themselves and their competitors. This is the point of marketing: to define your USP and set yourself apart. Would that other funeral directors understood this First Law. On their unusually well written website David Holmes says this:

Locally it can be hard to know who is who in the funeral business. Some companies trade with names that can easily confuse. Camberley & District funeral directors are in fact the Co-op, as are George Parker in Yateley. In Fleet the Co-op name appears above the door. In some parts of Surrey & Hampshire, the Office of Fair Trading has forced the Co-op to sell some funeral businesses. They had become too dominant, there was a lack of real competition said the OFT. The Co-op´s legal people insist we tell you that being big doesn´t of course mean being bad.

In Fleet, Farnborough and Frimley the Goddards & Ford–Mears firms are in fact owned by a major independent UK car dealer. Mr Goddard sold out many years ago; we suspect local families would have no idea who actually owns the businesses nowadays, they just remember the name. In Aldershot ´Finches´ are now part of Dignity Plc, a major national chain trading with hundreds of names.

We believe bereaved families benefit from dealing with owners rather than managers answering to distant directors. With David Holmes & Sons YOU are the priority, not Head Office rules and figures. Our service is second to none – our charges are reasonable. We´re not under pressure to sell you anything. For your protection, we are members of both respected trade associations.

The gist of what Mr Holmes has to say here is easily grasped: he is beset by Co-ops and by branches belonging to other funeral chains, and they are not, he reckons, trading transparently. Many of these branches are owned by Southern Co-operatives, an independent Co-op society which, nonetheless, is about to re-brand its funeral operation under Funeralcare, yet retain its independence. Confused? I am. Why the heck would they want to do that?

The OFT did, indeed, compel The Co-operative Group Limited (CWG), the mother of Funeralcare, to sell off some of its branches following its purchase of the Fairways Group in 2006. The OFT's grounds were that this acquisition could result in substantial lessening of competition in specified areas. When CWG proposed to sell some of its branches to Southern Co-ops it was told that it must not on the grounds that Southern was not "independent of and unconnected to CGL".

All this information is in the public domain. Mr Holmes's facts are easily checked and verified.

But his is a new business in the area. He is an independent, and proud of it. What, therefore, is the response of the Co-op? Raise its game? Trade transparently? Meet Mr Holmes on his own ground?

None of the above. They want to meet him in the High Court. Yes, can you believe it, they’re threatening legal action against Mr Holmes unless he removes the reference to the Office of Fair Trading. Is this Southern Co-ops or Funeralcare doing the suing? Sue King, press officer at Southern Co-ops, has promised to tell me.

Nice one, Co-op. If you can’t beat em, trash em.

In your dreams.

It's time to get rid of this professional fee

I’m off to buy a telly. I’ve done my comparison shopping on the internet (it’s what we do, isn’t it?) and (since you ask) tracked the cheapest to Makro. Good deals on just now. Get down there.

Would that I could do the same if I were shopping for a funeral—with some honourable exceptions. AW Lymn is one (their brochure is simply outstanding). Allcock’s is another.

It is useful here to compare the situation in the UK with that in the US. Over there, where funeral directors are far more rapacious than ours, they have, since 1984, been regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Funeral Rule. They must give you a General Price List (GPL) with itemised prices for goods and services. You can pick and choose.

It’s a good thing—up to a point. But there is one charge which is non-declinable: the basic services fee. This covers those funeral directors’ professional services which are common to most arrangements. It includes looking after the body, arranging the funeral, doing the paperwork, and it bundles a charge for overheads – heat, light, maintenance of premises, etc.

The Funeral Rule has made it possible for people in the US to comparison shop and decline goods and services they don’t want. Americans can buy a bargain price casket at Costco and evade the funeral director’s markup. You can’t do that in the UK.

Have funerals got cheaper in the US as a result? No, they have climbed steadily. How so? Because funeral directors have upped their basic services fee (cue: Doh!)

This penalises those people who care for their own after death and are their own funeral director. Whatever minimal services they may require from a funeral director, they must pay the full basic services fee. You may like to read this post by the excellent Holly Stevens on the matter.

Here in the UK funeral directors charge what they call a professional fee for providing essentially the same services covered by the US basic services fee. As in the US, it is fixed. If, therefore, you want to arrange a complex funeral which will involve the funeral director in hours of extra work, the likelihood is that he or she has no means of charging you for those extra hours. You will pay a not a penny more than the undemanding client who makes all their funeral arrangements in twenty minutes and isn’t seen again until the day of the funeral.

Just in case that sounds like good value, consider this: your funeral director has no financial incentive whatever to give you any extra time you need.

And let’s not overlook the fact that the undemanding client who takes up very little time inevitably subsidises those who take up lots. That client could be you.

Most funeral directors ‘bury’ some of their professional fee in the goods and services they sell you—hence the absurd mark-ups on coffins. Most of them, therefore, cannot afford not to charge you for any services you don’t want. If you want to reduce your costs and, say, tell your funeral director that you will not need his or her bearers to carry the coffin , and ask how much that will be off the bill, the likely reply will be that bearers are not charged separately, they are included in the professional fee.

In the days when all funerals were pretty much the same, a fixed professional fee was regarded as unobjectionable. What's more, our UK funeral directors have not bigged themselves up into a secular priesthood as they have in the US, neither are they as greedy or objectionable.

But on the one hand the increasing personalisation of funerals is causing the funeral director’s role as event organiser to grow—as is the role of professional funeral event organisers like Sentiment. On the other hand, the growth of the home funeral movement is causing the funeral director’s role, both as event organiser and custodian of the body, to shrink. The one-size-fits-all professional fee is incapable of covering the demands of such a wide variety of funeral clients. As funerals evolve, the professional fee looks increasingly inexact and lacking in transparency. It certainly discriminates against those who would, for whatever reason, unpick the funeral director's job description and carry out some of those tasks themselves. 

Greater flexibility is called for. It’s time to do away with the professional fee.

How do funeral directors achieve this and still remain profitable? If they’re any good they deserve to be. And let us never make the silly mistake of equating low cost with good value. So, what on earth can they possibly put in its place?

The solution is, actually, perfectly simple. Funeral directors must do what everybody else does, from jobbing gardeners to swanky lawyers.

Charge an hourly rate. 

From rags to riches

Whether or not funerals are too expensive depends on how much money you’ve got and how you like to spend it. Some like to say it with a Batesville casket, mountains of flowers, a fleet of vintage Bentleys, prancing horses, a military band, the Red Arrows—the sky’s the limit. If you’ve got lots of dough to blow and, therewith, administer a little fiscal stimulus to some local service providers, that would seem to be wholly unobjectionable.

Others prefer something simpler. Of those, a significant proportion urgently need something simpler. If you are jobless and skint, no disgrace in times like these, the Social Fund will pay up to £700 towards the cost of a funeral. But you can’t get a mainstream funeral at anything like that price. The average cost of a simple funeral is £1050 and that doesn’t include disbursements, which will eat up £500+. You’ll be paying off the balance for what will feel like eternity. The Social Fund will only cough up after the funeral. No wonder so many undertakers are refusing to take on clients who need to apply to it. They think they may never get paid.

What advice for such as you?

First, understand that you can accomplish the really important purposes of a funeral for very little. The most important part of the process, the farewell ceremony, needn’t cost you a penny. Do it yourself.

Second, get rid of the trappings: the hearse, the cars, the banks of flowers. Does this mean doing away with dignity? Of course not. Dignity is how you behave, not stuff you rent.

What’s going to cost? The burial or cremation will cost a few bob. Cremation is a lot cheaper. For that, you’ll have to stump up roughly £350-450 to the crematorium plus £147 for two doctors to pronounce your dead person dead. You’ll probably want to buy a coffin, though you could just wrap your dead person in a shroud of some sort. A coffin on ebay will set you back just £115 + £20 delivery. You’ll need a suitable vehicle to take your dead person to the place of disposal. Say goodbye to £700. Show a finger to the Social Fund.

There’s paperwork to do. No problem there. And there’s the small problem of what to do with the body while you wait for the funeral.

Most hospitals will keep a body in their mortuary for nothing if a person dies in the hospital. Some will even do the same for someone who has died at home. The alternative is to bring the body home, but the problem here is keeping it cool enough to delay decomposition. You can do your best, and screw the coffin lid down so as to keep any bad smells inside. But you may think it safer, if the hospital will not cooperate, to ask a funeral director to do all this. You will almost certainly find an independent funeral director to let you use their fridge (the bigger firms just aren’t geared to it). This may cost you up to £25 a day.

On the day of the funeral, drive down to the hospital or the funeral director with your ebay coffin, pop your dead person inside, and off you go.

It’s an unconventional way of proceeding, for sure. Will your crematorium, hospital or, if you use one, funeral director treat you as if you were a bungling amateur and a bloody nuisance? Absolutely not. It’s a heartwarming fact, the sort of discovery that restores your faith in human nature, that most crematoriums can’t do enough for you. The same goes for hospital mortuaries where a small (customary) consideration, £10-20, will earn you yet more goodwill. Even funeral directors (the smaller the better) will put themselves out for you. You really will be supported every inch of the way.

Not spending more than you have is vital. If you are brave and hardworking you can save £1,000 you never had and create a really meaningful, memorable funeral. When it’s all over you may, because you courageously rolled your sleeves up, experience a species of satisfaction that the Red Arrows could never have given you. The same goes if you could have afforded it, but preferred to engage rather than outsource.

You couldn't make it up

You couldn’t make it up. The Express could, perhaps, given its record for libelling people. Here is the essence of their story in today’s paper.

 

First, the headline: Three Orphans Sell Pets To Pay For Mum’s Funeral.

 

Got yer pulse racing? It’s right up there on a par with Headless Waiter Found In Topless Bar (New York Post).

 

Troy, 17, Rory, 15, and Alice, 14, are flogging all they’ve got to raise £2,500 for the funeral of their mum. “The youngsters have so far raised £525 by selling their beloved spaniels Peggy, Minnie and Sammy – for which they got a total of £250 – and some furniture from their council house in Whittlesey, Cambs.” Next to go is the Xbox. Troy says “We can’t face mum having a pauper’s funeral. We’re not asking for a lavish affair but she deserves a few flowers and a nice send-off.”

 

The funeral directors insist on having the money upfront. They offered to knock 200 quid off by squeezing the body into a smaller coffin, but the kids refused.

 

Enough!

 

What a shame it is that the people who feel duty-bound to spend more than they can afford on a funeral are so often those who can least afford it. No one calls those middle-class, cardboard coffin funerals paupers’ funerals.

 

Read the whole sorry story here -- if you can bear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

How different from US

The effects of the crash have yet fully to register. Brits have always had a puritanical, penitential streak, a disposition to pare cheese, save string, make do and mend. Those who will be wiped out are to be pitied. The rest of us, I think, are strangely relieved that it’s all over, happy to get back to self-reliance and common sense. We remind ourselves that the best things in life are recession-proof. The beauties of nature outshine the thrill of the mall.

 

Bad news is good news for the press; our papers are making merry feeding our schadenfreude and our fear. They’ve picked up on it in the US and it’s generated this headline in Time: Corpses Pile Up Amid Britain’s Financial Crisis.

 

You hadn’t noticed? It goes like this. Families on benefits are encountering delays in getting Social Fund payments for their funerals. Some funeral directors, unwilling to carry debt, are refusing to go ahead with funeral arrangements until they have been paid. It has taken nine weeks to hold a funeral for a Shrewsbury man. Questions have been asked in the House. The spectre of the Winter of Discontent stalks our streets.

 

In point of boring fact, this situation predates the crash. It affects only 27,000 funerals a year. So the chances of a corpse pile-up in your neighbourhood are bathetically less than nil.

 

The hullabaloo raises interesting questions about funeral costs, though, at a time when everyone will be interested in cheaper funerals. The Social Fund will cough up around £700 towards the funeral director’s bill and around £1,000 for disbursements. In all, that’s a few hundred pounds short of the cost of a typical funeral. Need a funeral cost this much? Two factors, in particular, make funerals arguably more expensive then they ought to be.

 

The first is the d-word, that peculiar word we apply only to the very old and the dead: dignity. If a funeral does not feature a hearse, bearers, shop flowers atop the coffin and a be-toppered undertaker walking in front of the cortege, most people would reckon that to be shabby rather than simple. Funeral directors could offer a service that costs less than £700, but there’d be little uptake. What’s more, their pricing structures are such that they’d struggle to make a decent profit if they did.

 

It is interesting to see how, in the US, the huge cost of a ‘traditional’ funeral -- cosmetised, casketed body, visitation, service, whole body burial in a vault -- has spawned its polar opposite, direct cremation, whereby the body is cremated as soon after death as statutorily possible (usually 24 hours) and the ashes returned to the family. Thus Florida Direct Cremation can offer to transport the body, coffin it, do all the paperwork and cremate it for an all-in price of $395. In sinking, shrinking British pounds that works out at just £225.76. Most charge around $900 -- £500.

 

Direct cremation does not preclude a funeral, but it is likely to be a funeral not for a body but for its ashes. The family chooses its venue. In the UK we are culturally conditioned to believe that a funeral for a body is indispensable. Could that change?

 

How much does cremating a body actually cost in terms of fuel and capital costs?  I ought to find out; perhaps a helpful person will tell me. It’s bound to be more in the UK than it is in the US because we cremate so inefficiently. And this brings me to my second factor: because a UK crematorium is both a ceremonial space in which to hold funerary rites and also a place where the dead are burned, it gets all that heat up to burn far fewer bodies than it could -- a very un-green way of doing things. A US crematory will burn bodies round the clock if necessary.

 

The UK model doesn’t work. More time is given to dead bodies than they need, too little to mourners. The outcome looks and feels like a production line. Not for the business of cremation it isn't.  

 

It would make more sense for bodies to be burned in a dedicated plant serving several ceremonial spaces. Given the lack of interest most people show in what happens after the curtains close, it would seem to be immaterial if a body is burned a few feet away from the ceremonial space or a few miles. Those few who do wish to see everything through and done properly could still go and do so -- as they do in the US. Sure, they would find themselves in an industrial environment, but scarcely more so than behind the scenes at a crem.

 

Should local authorities feel obliged to provide a ceremonial spaces? Or crematories? I can’t see why. But they’d hate to give up their crematoria because they yield good profits, which subsidise the costs of cemetery maintenance -- and, therefore, of burial. In this way, local authorities are able to compete unfairly with natural burial grounds run by the private sector. They further penalise cremation clients in order to fund unrelated projects. It’s a pity many of them don’t spend a little of that money on refurbishing their crem toilets.

 

Vested interests oppose change. Funerals cost more than they ought.

 

And the funeral directors? Are they making more than they ought? No. They must comply, both, with things as they are and with the wishes of their clients. If funerals cost more than they need, that’s not their fault. Having in mind what they do, they are entitled to a decent living.

 

As I go to press I can’t help thinking my argument is flawed. It is reassuring to know that my loyal readers will not hesitate to pounce.