continued
Here’s one – ‘the funeral director who
is first on the scene is the best one to
carry out the funeral.’
And here’s a couple of reasons why
this may not be the case:
Coroners use funeral directors to collect the
bodies of those who have died suddenly or
unexpectedly. The companies concerned are
contracted to the coroner to attend whenever such a death occurs. Mostly, the contract is
put out to tender, and the company who wins
the coroner’s removal tender will attend every
death that is under the coroner’s jurisdiction in
the area. Larger companies obviously are much
better placed to fulfil the criteria of attending
the scene of death within a specified timeframe
across a large area, and frequently these contracts are awarded to one of the large corporate
funeral directing companies.
Payments received from the coroner for each
‘removal’ may be relatively small in relation to
the costs involved in sending two members of
staff out to each sudden death, and it doesn’t
take much cynicism to imagine that the companies involved are less interested in helping
out Her Majesty’s Coroner in his / her work than
in the likelihood of each suddenly bereaved
family turning to the company who came and
collected the body to carry out the funeral for
them. In some companies, members of the funeral dire ctor’s staff attending may also be incentivised for ‘converting’ the coroner’s removal into a funeral for the company involved.
Nursing homes often have arrangements with
local funeral directors who will come and collect residents who have died. These arrangements may be formal (and brought to the attention of families when their relative moves
into the home), or they may be informal, perhaps based on a good relationship between the
manager and a local company, or some proactive ‘community liaison’ by the company concerned...
Christmas deliveries of generous gifts to nursing homes from funeral directors were far from
uncommon in the past, and may indeed contin-