Funeral homes receive rare “Letters of Assurance” from public authorities

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Every day I search out articles about Death Care services to provide me with information on topics of interest in our profession/industry.  One of the things that has been extremely disappointing to this life-long funeral director and funeral home owner is the amount of negative publicity our profession piles on itself because of what I call “bad actors” in the profession.

Virtually every day there are newspaper articles written about the negative effects funeral homes have had on the families that they are supposed to be serving.  Those articles are generally about unfulfilled promises but many times are much worse — such as having unsanitary conditions for the storage of bodies or even worse. . . such as just not doing what they said they did.  Many of these instances happen to be telling families that their loved ones have been cremated when, for whatever reason, the deceased is still on the funeral home premises and has not been cremated.

In fact, these incidents are so regular worldwide that Funeral Director Daily has quit writing about most of them.  If we did I’m guessing that you would hear of some type of negative incident weekly.  And, simply reporting on, and calling out the bad actors, is not something I find of interest to my readers.

However, every once in a while I am moved to say something.

The latest incident that I read about was an incident from Maryland which I learned of on January 27.  Here is an article and news story out of Baltimore on the situation.

This article from the BBC tells of a situation in Great Britain last year that shocked the British public.  The article from November 2024 states that it is prompting a review of the “funeral sector”.

One community, The Wealdon District Council, recently completed their assignment from the Ministry of Justice and Minister for Local Government which asked for “visits to be carried out as a matter of public reassurance in the largely unregulated industry”.

The Wealdon District Council released their findings to the public a couple of weeks ago.  In that release titled “Report shows confidence in funeral directors”  a total of 25 funeral directors, some with more than one branch in Rother and Wealden, were given public reassurance following assessment of hygiene, facility conditions and capability, traceability and transparency, dignity and condition of deceased people in their care and pre-paid funeral plans.  Here is that release.

That article also went on to say this “all but two of Rother and Wealden’s funeral directors were given letters of public assurance.  Officers were unable to carry our check on Aurora Funerals in Crowborough or Fenix Funeral Directors, listed in Bexhill, and public assurance was not given.”

Related Article — Just to prove my point about the number of these types of article, this article titled “Complex investigation into Glasgow funeral directors continues eight months after police sweep” was published by STV News the same day the Wealden District Council report was published.

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take:  I find it really sad that this type of “assurance” had to be given to the general public about funeral homes and funeral directors.  We should be better than this.

I’ve never been perfect in anything in my life, however, every single family that I served over 33 years got 100% effort and trustworthiness from me. . . . And, that included familes I knew that I would not get paid from.  To me, serving families in need with everything I had to offer was simply a part of my humanity.

We are entering a new generation of funeral consumers who can now facilitate their choices for disposition, celebration, and memorialization without the use of traditional funeral homes. If traditional funeral homes want to stay relevant with the consumers we hope to serve we cannot sink so low that we need government offices telling those consumers that we are “OK”.

It’s simply time to “Raise our game” to a level that there is absolutely no question in consumers’ minds that we will do what we say we will.

The Funeral Director Daily article published last Friday was about the World Economic Forum (WEF) recently held in Davos, Switzerland.  The world’s business leaders met there and one of the concepts for business growth that came out of that forum was “Trust”.  I think it is time that funeral directors, as a whole, re-establish ours.

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