The NAFD has a new CEO
We were pleased to receive an e-mail recently advising us that the National Association of Funeral Directors has appointed an interim CEO, some four months since the role became vacant. It’s been quite a while without a steady hand at the NAFD tiller, and taking on the tasks that would normally be […]
Low Cost Funeral Director of the Year
Lucy Coulbert of Coulbert Family Funerals Having geared her business specifically to help families of limited means arrange dignified and respectful funerals, Lucy was the only funeral director in England and Wales to give evidence to the 2016 DWP Bereavement Benefits Enquiry. Lucy gives a 100% customer-focused service, unconstrained by the traditions of funeral service. […]
Pauper-bashing?
FREE FUNERALS HERE! I bet you’ve never seen a banner outside your local registrar’s office with those words on it. Because the free (aka public health) funeral is, if not a well-kept secret, not something councils bang on about. Its minimalist aesthetic might make it irresistibly attractive to the middle classes. Seriously, the public health funeral enables us to […]
Funeral poverty: whose fault?
There’s an awful lot of talk just now about the inadequacies and iniquities of the Social Fund Funeral Payment. There’s also a lot of lobbying and campaigning going on to try and fix it. And a new term is born: funeral poverty. That the Funeral Payment is presently inadequate and its administration iniquitous is a […]
Catch 22 for the disadvantaged
A sad story here, and a sorry end we are likely to see more of. It was a Conservative government that introduced the Social Fund Funeral Payment at a level that ensured that the underprivileged and disadvantaged were not humiliated and marginalised when they had insufficient to pay for a funeral. How times have changed. Public […]
Sharp rise in Pauper’s funerals
Posted by Vale You’d be forgiven for thinking that Oliver Twist is in a workhouse somewhere asking for more. It seems extraordinary in 2012 that there are headlines like this in the Daily Telegraph this week, followed by the stark (and slightly ludicrous) quote from Kate Woodthorpe of the University of Bath that it is: […]
Publishing event of the year!
The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition A thoroughly updated and revised edition of the Natural Death Centre‘s celebrated handbook. Now presented alongside a new collection of essays on death, dying and funeral practices by doctors, historians, authors, poets, theologians and artists including Richard Barnett, David Jay Brown, Dr Sheila Cassidy, Charles Cowling, Bill Drummond, Stephen Grasso, […]
Who are the real rotters here?
Is this a Welsh thing, or is it beginning to happen all over the UK? In Wales, according to a BBC news article, the number of public health funerals is alleged to have doubled in a decade. This is contradicted by the view of the Local Government Association. In a survey dated 2010 it reports: […]
Undertakers’ nightmares #1 – the Social Fund Funeral Payment
Posted by Nick Gandon Methinks that the lunatics have taken over the asylum at the Department for Work and Pensions. Maybe lunatics is an unkind (and no doubt very non-pc) description, which on reflection, I should perhaps replace with the term “jobsworths”. Long known throughout the undertaking profession for their crazy deliberations over the claims […]
