Author: Fran Hall

Dignity PLC tell us it’s time to talk about quality and standards…

12 August 2018
Fran Hall
7 Comments
Categories: Dignity

Well, well, well.

The people in the Dignity press department are having a busy summer. Two national newspapers have published findings from the recent report commissioned by the funeral giant that operates under ‘over 500 distinct local brands with varying levels of local brand equity’ (source Dignity Investor Presentation June 2018).

Here’s a line from the article in the Daily Mail: ‘Around a third of funeral directors belong to chains such as Co-operative and Dignity, which commissioned the report and are not criticised in it.’ 

Apart from the pretty poor grammar, this is hardly a world shattering revelation – if you pay to commission a report on the industry you are a big player in, you’re unlikely to be seeking to find criticism of your own practice. No, this report is clearly part of the strategy to position Dignity as the leading industry provider of facilities and standards of care for the deceased, and is part of their response to the perceived threat to market share and ongoing ‘volume erosion’. As outlined in the Investor Presentation, ‘the combination of increased price competition and more demanding consumers requires a new approach.’

(That and the calamitous fall in Dignity’s share price precipitated by last year’s investment report by Beyond perhaps?)

And from the article in The Guardian ‘None of the 75 funeral companies visited by anonymous researchers for the report allowed access to their mortuaries.’

Well, why would they? How were these 75 funeral companies approached, and by whom? Would you want the funeral director looking after a relative to let a journalist have access to the mortuary where your relative was being cared for?

For the record, we ask all companies applying for Good Funeral Guide accreditation whether they would be willing to let clients or potential clients see the facilities where dead people are cared for. All would, with varying stipulations to ensure the privacy of the people in their care. And we go and visit them ourselves to make sure that we’d be willing to have one of our relatives looked after by each company we recommend.

Anyway, that’s by the by. Back to the Dignity PR.

Unfortunately, the ‘Time to talk about quality and standards’ report cited in the press doesn’t appear to be in the public domain, so there’s no way of knowing details of how the findings reported in the press were arrived at. Suffice it to say, the intended result seems to have been achieved, with Dignity positioning itself as the voice of the righteous, campaigning against shocking standards of cowboy funeral directors and calling for strong regulation of the industry.

In a statement earlier this year, Dignity CEO Mike McCollum said “We will also continue to demonstrate industry leadership by seeking the regulated market that will be good for clients and society and which plays to our strengths as a compliant and well managed business.”

Hmm.

The regulated market that plays to Dignity’s strengths is not quite the shape of regulation that we’d like to see being implemented.

Regulation in the right form is something to be welcomed, but regulation that would impose stringent barriers to entry into the funeral market (as intimated by Dignity as being the preferred option) is something to be resisted at all costs if, as a society we want to have the freedom to choose bespoke, creative and emotionally intelligent people to help us look after our dead.

Dignity have been undergoing an operating review with the help of LEK Consulting, which has resulted in a 3 year transformation plan involving separating front of house (client facing staff) and back of house (funeral directors, funeral service operators) to enable ‘specialisation and efficiency gains’. The former are involved with ‘client meetings and funeral arrangement, in branch pre need sales and viewings of the deceased’, while the latter are responsible for the collection and ongoing care of the deceased and the delivery of the funeral on the day.’

‘Optimisation of network footprint’ is another aim – involving rationalising locations with low performance or highly overlapping catchments and changing the operating model from 120+ networks with 5 branches per network to 70 networks with 10+ branches per network, and centralising operations where appropriate, e.g. mortuaries and fleet.

Investors have been assured that the Group has concluded that a future outlook of stable, comparable market share should be achievable through a combination of service, price and promotion, the latter illustrated by a key phrase from the Investor Presentation regarding future branding – the intent is for ‘marketing to promote Dignity’s commitment to high standards of care, quality service delivery and competitive entry prices’.

So far, so slick.

Congratulations LEK Consulting. And undoubtedly a nice welcome for the newly appointed but as yet unannounced Transformation Director who has ‘significant experience driving organisational change at major UK retailers’ and who will sit on the Dignity Executive board and report directly to CEO Mike McCollum.

The key message of Dignity being the saviour of standards in the funeral industry has been planted.

Time will tell whether bereaved families will be persuaded by the highly polished Dignity PR campaign, or whether instead people will seek out personalised service from local, independent, flexible and intelligent small businesses. The type of businesses where they can meet the people who will collect and care for their relative, have personal contact day or night with the owner, and know that their dead person won’t be shipped off to a centralised mortuary miles away.

We await the findings of the Competition and Markets Authority market study into the funeral sector with interest. As, we are sure, do the powers that be at Dignity PLC.

Marketing people, please read!

2 August 2018
Fran Hall
2 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, Death education

Our good friends at Life. Death. Whatever. have written a brilliant piece today about the current shock / horror media coverage of the advertising campaign for a funeral price comparison website that was rejected by Transport for London because of the potentially offensive nature of the adverts.

Read it here.

We echo everything said in the piece, and by Louise in her interview this morning on the BBC World Service ‘World Update’ programme – listen here (starts at 48.25)

Honour restored at Honor Oak Crematorium

31 July 2018
Fran Hall
No comments
Categories: crematoria

 

Guest post by Louise Winter

Back in April last year, we exposed the condition of the conveniences at Honor Oak Crematorium in South East London – peeling paint, a toilet held together by chewing gum and floors covered in used tissue paper.
 
Earlier this year, I was delighted to be invited back to Honor Oak to see, not only the newly refurbished conveniences, but the refurbished crematorium as a whole.  The chapel, waiting room, memorial rooms and gardens have all been renovated, making the most of a calming light blue and grey colour scheme throughout.  There’s even Dyson air blade hand dryers.
 
Honor Oak is an Italianate crematorium, built in 1939, with a chimney that resembles the cathedral campanile at Venice.  It was designed by Borough Architect William Bell and Maurice Webb, son of Sir Aston Webb, whose company had designed the adjoining Camberwell New Cemetery.  The crematoria around South East London mostly and unusually have descending catafalques, and Honor Oak is no exception.  
 
Just don’t lean any floral tributes against the base of the catafalque before it descends and the lid meets the floor.  I learnt that the hard way.
 
     
   
      
 
 

If it seems too good to be true…. the sad end of the promise of Ecolation

23 July 2018
Fran Hall
5 Comments
Categories: Bastards

Over time, we have received a number of well informed comments on a post written back in February 2017 on Ecolation, the supposedly innovative alternative to cremation.

It became apparent that we, along with many others, had been taken in by a sales pitch for something that wasn’t at all what it seemed.

The slick PR and the glossy website didn’t materialise into anything.

Fortunately, unlike others, the GFG didn’t have any money to invest in the promises that seemed so plausible when we visited the Dublin HQ, so it’s just embarrassment at having been fooled that we’re nursing now, not an empty bank account.

So we would like to say a public thank you and pay tribute to ‘Mary’, who has been indefatigable in her pursuit of the facts and the source of all the additional information which resulted in her latest comment on the blog post yesterday, including an excerpt from an article in The Sunday Times on July 8th, detailing the sorry end of this pipe dream.

We have reprinted Mary’s comment below to save you looking it up.

‘From the Sunday Times, July 8 2018, “Put on ice” :
“… Last month, the High Court Judge Deirdre Murphy ordered that Ecolegacy should be wound up and a liquidator should investigate payments made to Ennis and Brian McKimm, the company’s erstwhile chief operating officer who was formerly bankrupt in Northern Ireland.
Ecolegacy was “brought to its knees … by the mismanagement and intransigence of Tony Ennis” and the potential misappropriation of company funds, said the judge.  The ecolation unit in the company’s west Dublin warehouse cost 2.2m euro but is not fit for purpose and is worth about 300,000 euros as spare parts.”
I wonder how they spent 2.2m euro on an “ecolation” unit and how, with no possible product to carry out the process in the manner described in the sci-fi video, the whole thing could ever have ended other than with ecoLegacy on its knees.
And they never even had planning permission to do it on so much as a pork chop. 
Deirdre Murphy should be impressed that Anthony Ennis did not follow entirely in the footsteps of Susanne Wiigh-Masak’s footsteps – the high priestess of Promession.  She supported the notion of people putting Promession in their wills and several were held in deep freezers for many years after their death while the relatives hoped that the promised imminent arrival of a promator in Sweden would permit them to give their deceased loved ones their wished for disposal method.  She campaigned tirelessly for them to remain in freezers rather than be forcibly buried when the Swedish state withdrew the exemption because the promator was not materialising.  But, like Mr Ennis, she never came up with the goods.
It seems from this article that Mr Ennis instead focused his energies on wealthy live Americans keen to invest in his “thriving” venture.

Here’s the link to the detailed article.’

Going Green at Brookwood Cemetery

22 July 2018
Fran Hall
2 Comments
Categories: death and funerals, funeral trends, funeral wishes, green funeral, natural burial

 

It’s been twenty five years since the inspirational Ken West MBE opened the very first natural burial ground at Carlisle cemetery, and here at GFG Towers we felt that this landmark anniversary needed to be acknowledged. Members of the Good Funeral Guild felt so too, and, under gentle pressure from Stephen Laing we have co-opted fellow Guild members Emma Curtis and Sarah Weller to help us organise a celebratory day to commemorate Ken’s achievement at the beautiful, iconic Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey on Sunday September 9th, between 10.00 and 17.00.

Since 1993 when the very first natural burial took place, over 300 sites around the UK have been opened, and countless thousands of people have chosen this gently, environmentally responsible alternative to cremation or traditional burial. Despite this, natural burial lags behind in the statistics, being the choice of only around 1% of the population, which we think is a real shame. We’d love to help raise awareness of natural burial generally, so this celebratory day is a starting point for us. Watch this space for further developments.

In the meantime, the event on Sunday 9th September will be open to everyone to attend, with an opportunity to explore the fabulous historic Brookwood Cemetery as a bonus. The London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company was established in 1852 to provide ‘a great metropolitan cemetery situated in the suburbs, large enough to contain all of London’s dead for ever’, in response to great public concern about the state of London’s cemeteries. Two years later, Brookwood Cemetery was opened and the London Necropolis Railway ran between Waterloo station and two private stations in the cemetery, carrying coffins and mourners directly into the cemetery grounds. Since then, over 240,000 people have been buried here, and the cemetery is a hidden wonder of beautiful landscaping, quietly fading memorials and mausolea, immaculate military cemeteries and gems such as the only Zoroastrian cemetery in Europe and the St. Edward Brotherhood, a small Orthodox Christian monastery.

Set in the heart of Brookwood Cemetery is the natural burial area, Gillian’s Meadow, and it is here that we will be gathering to commemorate the establishment of natural burial as a viable alternative to the existing funeral choices. The Open Day will run from 10.00 until 17.00, and along with the ceremonial tree planting, there will be activities throughout the day to encourage guests to explore incorporating nature and ritual in their end of life decisions.

Death cafe picnics will run alongside rustic crafts, mandala and garland making, story telling,message writing and a ‘Time to Altar Grief’ installation, there will be a book tent where you can browse through all kinds of books on death and funerals, a chance to meet and chat with people working in the funeral industry who can answer any questions you might have, an opportunity to see a grave prepared for a natural burial, and Sound in the Woodland. We will also be offering Forest Bathing walks, allowing the opportunity to learn about the healing benefits of being among trees and nature, in the perfect setting. Bring a picnic and a rug and come and spend the day immersed in the beauty of Brookwood.

It will be a wonderful day, commemorating a hugely important movement inspired a quarter of a century ago by the brave innovation of Ken West and Carlisle City Council. We’ll be inviting all of the UK natural burial site owners and operators to come along and join us in acknowledgement of Ken’s influence, as well as local dignitaries and friends of Brookwood Cemetery. Members of the Good Funeral Guild will be coming along too, and the day will be open to the public to come and be part of.

Oh, and there will be cake. Lots of cake. With a very special centrepiece cake created by Conjurer’s Kitchen.

Details about Going Green at Brookwood can be found on Facebook here.

 

Those whacky funerals….

18 June 2018
Fran Hall
1 Comment
Categories: funeral customs, media's view of funerals

Guest post from Jonathan Taylor, independent funeral celebrant in Totnes.

We are always delighted to receive guest posts from long time readers of the GFG blog, and this one is very topical given the obsession with ‘whacky funerals’ from the media (most recently the Nigerian man who buried his father in a brand new car, see here) and the keenness of Co-operative Funeralcare to position itself as ‘a thought leader on funeral trends and to tackle the misconception that large funeral directors were impersonal’ in pumping out PR about bespoke funerals -see here.

Over to you Jonathan.

I’m often asked, regarding my work with funerals; “What is the whackiest funeral you’ve ever done?”

It went like this. Well, as a matter of fact almost all of them have gone like this:

A gaunt figure in faux-Victorian fancy dress, carrying a silver-capped cane and black leather gloves, slowly led a specially adapted, shiny black vehicle, followed by two extremely long motor cars carrying the family, up the crematorium drive.

A lozenge-shaped veneered box with brass-effect plastic handles, topped by a floral wreath and containing the dead person’s body, was visible through the high glass sides of the leading vehicle as it pulled up by the door. Four pinstripe-clad gentlemen bowed to the box with an air of contrived solemnity resembling some obscure parody of grief, and carried it into a mock-ecclesiastical chapel and onto a roller-topped bench within a curtained area, before melting away mysteriously to allow Mister Macabre to usher his victims into parallel rows of benches a short distance from the corpse.

Everyone listened to a tribute to the person whose funeral it was, spoken by me as I stood between the living and the dead. Someone read a poem for him, the curtains closed over the coffin to his favourite tune, and the attendant signalled the allotted time was up. Black Glove bowed to the curtains and lubricated everyone’s way outside round the back, where he put the coffin flowers on display and stood clasping his top hat with an air of restless patience before driving off to meet another wood-effect box for a similar procedure; and the chief mourners departed, tangibly relieved, in the expensive cars that passed an identical cortège of vehicles, led by another Dickensian character, on its way up the drive.

Weird enough. But when I’ve asked bereaved families why they’d chosen this particular style of grieving ritual, they’ve mostly been at a loss to explain.

We’d like just a few minutes of your time…

7 June 2018
Fran Hall
3 Comments
Categories: funeral, funeral plans

Dear reader

We’d like to ask for a few minutes of your time to respond to two important funeral related consultations.

The first is the Funeral Market Study by the Competition and Markets Authority. This forms part of a year long study into the state of the British funeral market which will examine how competition between funeral directors works and transparency issues in the provision of funerals, and will also look at competition in the crematoria segment of the industry.

For anyone who has an opinion on transparency of ownership or pricing of funerals, it is important that your voice is added to the responses that will be received. You can download the CMA Statement of Scope here. Responses are requested by June 28th 2018.

The second, parallel consultation is the Government’s Call for Evidence to aid in the design for a more appropriate regulatory framework for the pre-paid funeral plan sector. The government is particularly interested in views from all affected stakeholders, including funeral plan providers, funeral directors, insurers, asset managers, introducers, actuaries, solicitors, and consumer interest groups. The consultation document can be downloaded here. The consultation closes on August 1st 2018.

We’ve waited a long time for the government to show some interest in the funeral industry, so let’s make sure that the voices that are heard are telling them what is actually happening.

Team GFG

A night (and a morning) at the movies

23 May 2018
Fran Hall
1 Comment
Categories: Attitudes to death, bereavement, Death education, Films about death, Grief, Progressive funeral directors

Here at GFG Towers we rarely get a night out, so it was rather a shock to get to go to the cinema twice in one weekend – so much so that we’ve only just recovered enough to write about it. (One film is out there available for you to go and see, while the other is yet to be screened for the public, we went to a private screening by invitation only – a first for the GFG!)

Links to trailers for both films are at the foot of this page.

On Friday, we joined the audience at the London UK premier of A Love That Never Dies, the film made by Jimmy Edmonds and Jane Harris for The Good Grief Project as a way of honouring the memory of their son Josh, who died in a road accident six years ago. (A post on this blog featured the film Jane and Jimmy made of his funeral in 2011)

A Love That Never Dies portrays the road trip that Jane and Jimmy made across the United States, meeting other bereaved parents on the way and hearing them talk about their grief. The film is beautiful, the stories powerful and compelling, and the portrayal of grief in its many forms is unflinching and unafraid. Some people may find this film difficult to watch because of the raw emotion voiced by parents whose children’s lives have been cut short. We found it captivating. This is an important film. If you want to truly learn from people who are living with grief, then find a screening near you and go and see it.

The second film of the weekend was shown to an invited audience only at the Duke of York’s Picture House in Brighton, the oldest cinema still currently in use in the UK. Dead Good is an independent feature documentary following the work of the team at ARKA Original Funerals, one of the GFG Recommended funeral directors and pioneering champions of empowering families to reclaim the care of their dead.

Three extraordinary families allowed the filmmakers unprecedented access to follow their journeys through the limbic space between a death occurring and the funeral ceremony, and as an audience we were privileged to share their experiences as they were gently supported to be as involved as they wanted in the care of the person who had died, and the creation of the ceremony to honour their memory.

Thought provoking, stunningly crafted and shot – and occasionally unexpectedly humorous, this is a ground-breaking film that challenges much of what we have come to accept as being the norm regarding arranging a funeral.

The standing ovation for Rehana Rose, the director, producer and cinematographer responsible for creating this beautiful film was utterly deserved.

Editor’s note: Although it is not yet on general release, the team behind Dead Good hope that it will be picked up by a distributor or screened at a film festival soon. Follow them on social media to stay informed @DeadGoodFilm on Twitter and Facebook

See the trailer for A Love That Never Dies here:

And the sneak preview of Dead Good here:

The slightly incapacitated Mr Richard Sage..

16 May 2018
Fran Hall
7 Comments
Categories: Richard Sage

The GFG blog has long taken an interest in the goings on of Mark Kerbey, aka Richard Sage.

In fact there have been 18 blog posts since 2008 about his antics – see here 

So when we received a couple of e-mails from long standing readers pointing us to this article in the Basildon Canvey and Southend Echo, we were unsurprised to see that Mr Sage is appearing in court in Basildon at this very moment, denying three counts of fraud by misrepresentation.

The charges are that between August 2012 and October 2014, three couples handed over thousands of pounds to Mr Sage in payment for funeral plans that apparently were not arranged.

The trial began yesterday and is due to last three days.

Mr Sage appeared in the dock on crutches and with one arm in a sling. The reasons for this were not mentioned by the Echo.

We’ll keep you posted as to the verdict.

Update 23.05.18 – The jury found Mr Sage guilty of one count of fraud. Sentencing has been postponed until June 25th to enable Mr Sage’s medical treatment for his injured hand to be continued. See today’s newspaper report here. 

How much do funerals really matter?

14 May 2018
Fran Hall
4 Comments
Categories: Academia and death, bereavement, funeral, Progressive funeral directors, research

Team GFG are honoured to have been invited to be part of an advisory committee to support a pioneering new study that is being launched today to try and discover how much funerals really matter. And we are happy to help spread the word about it to encourage people to sign up as participants.Please share this information far and wide to reach as many people as possible.

The research is being carried out to identify which aspects of funerals people find helpful, and to see whether funerals have an impact on long term wellbeing. It is hoped that this knowledge will then be used to support people in the best way possible.

Sarah Jones, from Full Circle Funerals in Guiseley, West Yorkshire is the inspiration behind the project.

In her role as a funeral professional, she realised that although there is a common assumption that a ‘Good Funeral’ is helpful for bereaved individuals and communities, debate remains about what constitutes a ‘Good Funeral’ and how funeral directors can best support the families they work with.

In addition, after carrying out an in-depth literature review, Sarah noted that while authors and industry experts proport that funerals, funeral attendance and the presence of rituals are helpful in supporting better bereavement outcomes, and while it is suggested that if individuals feel more in control and are more involved in planning or participating in the funeral, then this is beneficial; most of the published literature consistent of anecdotes, reflections and expert opinion – and no prospective cohort study has been carried out to date.

There seemed to be a gap. And Sarah set about filling it.

She has designed a comprehensive project with advice from Dr. Julie Rugg, Senior Research Fellow at the University of York, who sits on the advisory panel along with Reverend Ruth Dowson, from Leeds Beckett University, who combines her academic interest in events management with theological perspectives, Julie Dunk, Chief Executive of ICCM, the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management and Terry Tennens, Chief Executive of SAIF, the National Society of Allied and Independent Funeral Directors.

It’s a stellar line up, and everyone involved can see the enormous potential merit in the proposed study. The preparation and planning is all done, the design and method have been agreed, and the procedure and timetable signed off. Now we simply need to find participants.

So, if you would like to take part, what’s involved?

Firstly, you need to be over the age of 18, and to have attended the funeral of a close relative. You need to feel willing and able to discuss your experience without this causing you any undue stress or anxiety.

If this description fits and you feel that you would like to participate, you will be asked to answer some questions with the researchers, either on the phone or face to face (depending on what you prefer and where you live). This can take place either at your home or at Full Circle Funerals in Guiseley. The interview is likely to take between one and two hours. It is likely that most participants will be asked to complete a further questionnaire after six months and approximately one year, either by e-mail or by phone, and all answers will be anonymised and handled in confidence. Ethical and legal practice will be followed at all times.

Full details can be found on the participant information sheet here.

If you would like to help with this important work, please contact Sarah on 01943 262626 or sarah@fullcirclefunerals.co.uk

The webpage about the research project can be found here.

Please pass on details of this study to anyone you think might be interested in taking part.

Thank you!