The judges would like to say…

Miniature coffins provided by the generous sponsor of this year’s awards, Greenfield Creations 

Photograph by Jayne Lloyd. 

Over the next week or two,we’ll be publishing on this blog the reasons for the judges’ decisions in choosing the winners and runners up in the 2017 Good Funeral Awards.

We’re starting off today with a word from the judges in their introduction to the announcements:

“With an overwhelming number of nominations, entries and supporting testimonials, the 2017 awards have been even more difficult to judge than in previous years. This year, many categories have ten, twenty or even more finalists, and each one is deserving of congratulation.

It is a thankless task to select the most deserving winners from so many outstanding entries, as we know that in doing so we are disappointing so many, so we apologise in advance to those of you who won’t be leaving today with a statue and a certificate.

The whole process has been extraordinarily difficult and involved long discussion and deliberation before we arrived at our decisions.

We are confident that those who have won an award today are deserving of it, but we would like to say on record that we have been immensely impressed by the calibre of all the entries we have read.

All the finalists in this year’s Good Funeral Awards deserve an accolade, so on behalf of the families that you serve, we would like to thank you all for what you do.“