Keeping an eye on the costs
Hats off to independent funeral booking website Funeralbooker for publishing their findings on the costs of funeral disbursements. Funeral poverty shows no sign of abating as new data reveals the most expensive crematoria and cemeteries in the UK Key points: THE COST OF DYING CONTINUES TO RISE. NEW DATA REVEALS THE SOUTH OF […]
Do you know?
Wednesday’s Budget contained the above intriguing announcement. What’s going on here? There may be a clue in the small print of the 2015 Budget (which we clean missed) when the Chancellor announced: The Government will conduct a review into the size and provision of crematoria facilities to make sure they are fit for purpose and […]
Bring on the empty corpses
Book review: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty Caitlin Doughty, graduate in medieval history and author of a sunny thesis entitled The Suppression of Demonic Births in Late Medieval Witchcraft Theory, rejects a promising career in academia in favour of one as a corpse handler and incinerator of the dead. Anticipating bewilderment she asks, […]
Who’s sorry now?
The baby ashes scandal which broke at Mortonhall crematorium quickly spread to other crematoria in Scotland. Will it develop into a UK-wide scandal? Have other crematoria been failing to recover ashes from infants despite the availability of forty-year-old science showing that a foetus as young as 17 weeks’ gestation will, if cremated gently, yield ash? […]
How Mortonhall happened
By Ken West We are now aware that Mortonhall Crematorium cremated hundreds of babies and infants, and denied that any cremated remains existed. The recent report by Dame Elish Angiolini condemned this practice and exposed it as a scandal. More recently, the Infant Cremation Commission chaired by Lord Bonomy has reported. Anybody reading these reports […]
Statement by the FBCA
The Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities has received much criticism on this blog in the past week. I have received an assurance from the FCBA Secretary that a response will be forthcoming.
Tim Morris of the ICCM on the baby ashes scandal
We are pleased this morning to publish the responses of Tim Morris, Chief Executive of the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management to four questions we emailed him last weekend concerning the recommendations of the Bonomy Report which was set up in the aftermath of the Mortonhall Investigation Report. We are extremely grateful to him for taking […]
All that remains
There is no legal definition of ashes. Perhaps you prefer to call them ‘cremated remains’. Or ‘tangible remains’. Or even ‘total recoverable remains’. Selecting just one term and assigning an exact definition to it was one of the jobs Lord Bonomy set himself in his report. The fact that there remains no legal definition has […]
Baby ashes scandal: responses to Bonomy
The Bonomy report lays bare the reasons why some crematoria have been able and willing to recover ashes from infant cremations and others haven’t. Given the enduring and agonising distress and uncertainty this has caused to an uncountable number of parents, it can only be a matter of time before the media give it the treatment […]
Cremating all over the world
By Dr Clive T Chamberlain: The cremation culture and equipment used in the UK is not the only way to dispose of human remains, although cremation in the rest of Europe is similar – driven as it is by a commonality of environmental regulation. The cremators used, and the legislation which controls their use are […]
