These are just a few examples of recent situations that
have been brought to our attention and where we have
had to get involved to educate and inform the so-called
‘professionals’ involved and put them straight on the
facts:
There is no law requiring a funeral director be used for a
funeral.
A local authority – or any other body – may not prohibit a
family from carrying out a burial without a funeral
director. Provided that the Registrar’s certificate or Coroner’s
Order for burial is delivered with an interment form prior to
the burial, and the deceased is brought to the cemetery with
enough people to carry and lower the coffin, it must be
permitted.
Cremation is never mandatory.
Debt liabilities stops with the dead person. That
includes the cost of any ‘pauper’s funeral arranged by
the local authority for unclaimed bodies. The council can
pursue the dead person’s estate but not distant or estranged
relatives.
There is no law to say that once a death has
occurred the body must be removed. Dead people
can be kept at home until the day of the burial or
cremation if that is the wish of the family.
According to legal advice obtained from the Institute of
Cemetery and Crematorium Management, it is unfair
simply to tell families to arrange their own public
liability insurance for a one-off event unless there is
already an established insurance scheme, which the
family can buy into. Otherwise it would be too prohibitively expensive and complicated for the family to arrange and
would be the equivalent of saying ‘no’.
Clearly there will be liabilities for burial authorities if
there are accidents whilst families are doing their own
funerals, so the burial authority or company needs to carry out
the appropriate risk assessment. It is also important that there
is insurance in place to cover all such risks for the benefit of
everyone involved. If the cemetery operator extends its own insurance for this purpose it would, in the opinion of the ICCM,
be fair to ask the family to contribute to the additional cost of
that insurance as well as the cost of any additional supervision
required for the event.
There are no charges involved in a body or coffin
crossing county borders.
Any requirement for embalming prior to viewing is simply company policy, not anything that can be attributed to
Health and Safety or other legislation.