Photo by Niv Singer on Unsplash
For the last five years, every funeral business and crematorium operator in the UK has been under statutory obligation to comply with the legally binding Funeral Market Investigation Order 2021.
Details of the Order are at the end of this blog post, if anyone needs to refresh their memory.
The Order came into force on 16th September 2021 after a lengthy market study and market investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), during which the CMA rightly identified significant issues with how the funeral market operates, and the corresponding detrimental effect on bereaved people, the customers of the sector.
The Order is a statutory requirement of funeral directors, with the most important requirement being that every funeral business must clearly display their prices in such a way that the public can easily compare different businesses – a standardised price list (SPL) that has to be prominently displayed, as a standalone document, in the window of each branch, inside each branch in areas where the public frequented, and on the website no more than one click away from the home page.
It means that the public should be easily able to compare like with like, without having to engage with a company, or wade through a myriad of pricing done in different ways.
This all sounds very reasonable, doesn’t it?
The UK trade associations agree.
Under the UK Funeral Director Code adopted by both associations, the National Association of Funeral Directors (NAFD) and the Society of Allied & Independent Funeral Directors (SAIF) both require that their members must ‘comply with all legal and regulatory requirements’ (Principle 7).
To be a member of a trade association, therefore, a funeral business must be doing as mandated by the CMA in their Market Order. As in, obeying the law. Not exactly rocket science.
So, where are we five years on?
We have been given evidence of multiple, so-called reputable funeral businesses that have blatantly and completely failed to comply with the CMA’s Funeral Markets Investigation Order, specifically by not displaying the standardised price list as required. Not in their windows. Not in their branches. And not, unaltered from the specified wording and format, on their websites.
We have been given evidence of complaints to the CMA about non-compliant funeral directors going unacknowledged.
We have been given evidence of complaints to the NAFD about a non-compliant member being responded to with the following (poorly written) statement:
“NAFD are not able to accept complaints in relation to individual staff members, billing disputes or any elements covered by general law.
As your complaint centres around the CMA compliance our member firm, a voluntary membership organisation, this is not something we are able to get involved in in the first instance.”
Kind of odd, given that failure to comply with the law should – automatically – equal failure to comply with the Code that all members of the NAFD have to abide by.
The NAFD are effectively shrugging their shoulders and saying ‘not our problem mate’ when told that one of their members is in breach of their own Code of Practice through not complying with the law.
This doesn’t exactly instil confidence in their much boasted about inspection process – what do the NAFD ‘Standards and Quality Inspectors’ do when checking the professional standards of members if they discover during a visit that a member firm is failing to comply with both their Code and the law?
And, irrespective of the trade associations and their management of member compliance with their Code, there appears to be no way of establishing what – if any – action the CMA is taking to ensure compliance with the Market Order that they made in 2021.
Emails alerting the dedicated team at the CMA to funeral businesses that are failing to comply with the Order go unacknowledged and unanswered, and there is no direct contact number for the Funerals Team – if, indeed, this team still exists.
We have discovered that, inexplicably, telephone calls to the CMA to try to find out the contact details of the correct person to report non-compliance to get cut off if the caller does not know the name of the person they wish to speak to, ‘unless the call is in regard to an ongoing murder investigation’.
We have no idea why the CMA is involved with ongoing murder investigations.
And we haven’t managed to establish whether there is anyone at the CMA working on, interested in, or overseeing complaints about funeral businesses in breach of the law.
We have issued a Freedom of Information Request to try to establish what the current practice at the CMA is on receipt of complaints about non-compliant funeral businesses, and what actions are taken to ensure compliance. A 2023 public post by the CMA states that they had started enforcement action to resolve compliance issues that they had identified; we would like to know whether this is ongoing or if it has stopped.
We’ll let you know what we find out.
And we’re not going to just let this drop – there’s too much at stake.
The government won’t get regulation of the sector in place anytime soon, and in the meantime, the public deserve the bare minimum of protection of knowing they can compare prices charged by funeral businesses by simply looking at a standardised price list in the window.
In the meantime, if you’ve reported a non-compliant funeral business to the CMA, please let us know what happened?
Email fran.hall@goodfuneralguide.co.uk – confidentiality assured.
We shared this blog post with both trade associations before posting and look forward to their comment.
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The Funerals Market Investigation Order 2021 has six parts:
(a) Part 1 contains general provisions, which include specifying when the Order comes into force, the geographic scope of the Order, and definitions used throughout the Order.
(b) Part 2 requires funeral directors to display and supply certain information, and sets out how, where and when this must be done. It requires funeral directors to display and supply information on their own prices and terms of business and the charges made by local crematorium operators. Funeral directors must also disclose information relating to the ownership of their business and certain other related commercial interests they may have.
(c) Part 3 prohibits funeral directors from making certain arrangements with, or payments, benefits or gifts to, third parties such as hospitals, hospices, care homes, providers of bereavement services in a hospital setting or providers of palliative care, and from soliciting business through coroner and police contracts. It requires funeral directors to terminate any such existing arrangements.
(d) Part 4 requires crematorium operators to display and supply certain information, and sets out how, where and when this must be done.
(e) Part 5 requires certain funeral directors and all crematorium operators to provide the CMA with specified revenue and volume information.
(f) Part 6 requires certain funeral directors and all crematorium operators to send annual compliance statements to the CMA, and confirms the CMA’s power to require information from, and give directions to, funeral directors and crematorium operators.
