Funeral directors who’ve been storing uncollected ashes, in some instances for decades, at their own expense will be made to pay to return them to crematoria, under new proposals by the Law Commission.
Crematoria will be compelled by law to accept them and may scatter or inter them in the same way as ashes left uncollected at crematoria or immerse them in a body of water.
In addition, the Law Commission recommended the creation of a new criminal offence carrying an unlimited fine or up to two years in prison of making false representations in relation to the return of ashes scheme.
The proposals are part of the Commission’s report on burial and cremation, which has wide-ranging recommendations for modernising laws, some of which have remained largely unchanged for over 170 years.
There are between 250,000-300,000 sets of unclaimed ashes stored by funeral directors, who are stuck with them when families can’t or won’t collect them. While right of return has been welcomed, reaction from the trade has been mixed.
National Society of Allied and Independent Funeral Directors (SAIF) CEO Terry Tennens said: “The scheme for returning uncollected ashes to crematoria is a sensible solution for bereaved families and our members, who have acted as unofficial custodians for hundreds of thousands of sets of uncollected remains for far
too long. That said, we are uncomfortable with the proposal that cremation authorities charge a fee to return these ashes. Independent funeral directors already go to great lengths, often over many years, to encourage families to collect their relatives’ remains.
“While we support strict penalties for any dishonest representation within this scheme, our members have already borne the storage and administrative costs of a problem they did not create. So, it feels fundamentally unfair to further burden small businesses with extra costs for simply doing the right thing
and clearing this historic backlog. We will be urging the Government to ensure that any fee structure is fair and balanced, so it doesn’t disincentivise clearing these shelves.”
Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management CEO Mathew Crawley said: “The fee for funeral directors returning ashes to crematoria must be reasonable and proportionate, as crematoria will have already carried out their duties at the point of releasing the ashes into the care of funeral directors. The use of these fees would account for associated administration tasks and physical disposition of the ashes.”
Industry commentators suggested that the cost to crematoria of dealing with the ashes backlog could be as high as £9m. There are significant environmental considerations too.
Crawley commented: “The environmental impact of the volume of returned ash should also not be underestimated. It could lead to remedial soil works being necessary, both in the short and longer terms, both of which may incur a further cost implication for crematoria sites.”
This is the first of three reports. The second covering new funerary methods is expected shortly and the much-anticipated third report looking at regulation and legislation for the funeral sector will be published in summer.
The report also recommends direct cremation providers should be required to inform families when and where their loved ones were cremated.
Tennens said: “While SAIF welcomes the steps towards greater transparency in direct cremation, we believe recommendations should go further to protect consumers from the opaque nature of national online models. In particular, we are calling for a requirement that all funeral providers must disclose the full chain of third-party contractors involved in their infrastructure.”