Dame Caroline Dinenage

I am afraid that it will be a rather morbid debate this evening. We spend remarkably little time in our lives thinking about the practicalities of death, and it is probably part of human nature that we do not dwell too much on the inevitable future fate that awaits us. That means we put far too much implicit trust in those who take responsibility for our bodies, and in those of our loved ones when we die. We all assume that in death we will be treated with respect and care by professionals, but his evening I am afraid I will share some hard truths about the gruesome reality of death. I warn anyone watching that what I have to say will be graphic and distressing—there in no way around that. Last year, Gosport residents and funeral directors Richard Elkin and Hayley Bell were found to have kept 46 bodies entrusted to their care in a completely inappropriate environment with an unregulated temperature. Describing entering the place to see his mother, one of my constituents said, “the awful smell is something that will never leave me”. Concerns about what was going on behind the doors of Elkin and Bell funeral directors were first raised by local residents, and then by the senior coroner at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth. A body had been sent for a post-mortem that was “laying in pools of bodily fluids” and infested with maggots. The post-mortem also found that the deceased individual had suffered a spinal fracture after death. After a Gosport borough council environmental health investigation raised concerns but took no further action, a few months later, simply because bills had not been paid, bailiffs attended the property, where two bodies were discovered, putrefying, in a room with bloodstained floors, water dripping from the ceiling, and broken windows. One of them was an elderly gentleman who had been left for 36 days. His body was found in a badly decomposed condition. It is too much of a cliché to compare this to a horror movie, because this is real life, or real death. When the family of one of the deceased was contacted, they were surprised, because they were under the impression that their loved one had already been cremated. The company had certainly taken payment for it. As the Minister will know, it was completely legal for Elkin and Bell to keep dead bodies in a room like that. Elkin and Bell could only be brought to justice by some incredibly diligent work by Hampshire police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and John Price KC, using a variety of different offences including fraud, forgery and a piece of common law that dates back to Victorian times. The crime of preventing lawful and decent burial was dusted off from the days when it was used to convict grave robbers. That is instead of what should have been possible, which was sentencing the pair because they had wilfully neglected bodies in their care, and treated people’s loved ones as nothing more than money spinners. The case highlighted that the funeral sector is nothing better than a wild west. When this was first brought to my attention, I was incredulous and horrified to learn that there is no regulation of any kind governing the sector. In fact, the only law that governs the funeral industry is around the financial transparency of funeral plans, and that was put in place after a Competitions and Markets Authority investigation in 2021. There are simply no mandatory qualifications, no accreditation, no licensing, no designated working practices or formal inspection and, crucially, no law to fall back on when things go wrong.