UK funeral director jailed for 20 years for ‘dreadful’ practices

LONDON: A British funeral director was jailed for 20 years on Friday (Jul 31) for “dreadful” conditions at his parlour including bodies stored on racks for months in an “undignified manner” and relatives handed other people’s ashes.

Robert Bush ran his funeral parlour in Hull in northeastern England for over 12 years, offending on an “industrial scale” and causing “anguish and pain on a scale beyond comprehension”, judge Nicholas Hilliard said.

The 48-year-old undertaker pleaded guilty to 67 offences. He will serve at least half of his sentence before being eligible for parole.

As Bush began his sentence, the government pledged to “crack down on rogue operators”.

Police who searched the funeral director’s premises after a tip-off in 2024 found 31 bodies in a cold storage area that should have been cremated months earlier. They included a stillborn baby that had been there for almost two years.

Most of the bodies were “uncovered and on racks … of a cold storage area” Hilliard told Hull Crown Court, describing conditions on the premises as “dreadful”.

An ex-employee described the funeral parlour as a “horror scene”, the court heard at an earlier hearing.

Police found more than 100 sets of ashes on the premises, and determined there were at least 46 cases where relatives had been given the wrong ashes.

Many families discovered they had been left with nothing of their loved ones’ remains, the judge said. In some cases they were only left with “an empty plastic bag or a teaspoonful of ashes the police managed to recover”.