Families demand regulation for funeral directors, amid sentencing of 'pure evil' Robert Bush
Disgraced funeral director Robert Bush is to learn his fate after a five-day sentencing hearing in which more than 200 victims described the devastating impact of his crimes.
Bodies left on racks in a back room, piles of ash on the floors and personal belongings strewn among car and motorcycle parts.
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This is what police were confronted with when they entered Legacy Independent Funeral Directors in Hull in March 2024.
The owner, Robert Bush, will be sentenced today at Hull Crown Court after pleading guilty to 30 counts of preventing a lawful burial, 35 counts of fraud by false representation, fraudulently running a business and theft from charities.
Police have described it as a "complex investigation", and it has brought into focus a glaring issue: the lack of regulation of funeral directors.
Those in the profession can sign up to trade bodies such as the National Association of Funeral Directors, which has certain codes of practice. But these codes of practice are not enforced, and directors are not obliged to sign up.
Due to these gaps in the system, LBC has been told it is fairly easy to set up your own funeral home without facing much scrutiny.
Kevin Moxon, an independent funeral director who is also in Hull, told LBC: "When I opened here, I didn’t need any qualifications as such to become a funeral director.
“If I was to open the premises next door, which is a food outlet, I would need a hygiene certificate and people coming to inspect the premises.
“Because I’m a funeral director, I don’t need that. We’re not like Australia or America where you have to have a license in order to trade. I don’t know if that’s something the government is looking at.”
Kevin says the findings at Legacy have shocked the profession.
“Every funeral director I know is absolutely appalled at what happened here and how it's happened.
"It's something that you'd expect to see on the television, on the news from America or something like that and be surprised even then.”
Detective Superintendent Alan Curtis was the senior investigating officer in the case of Legacy Independent Funeral Directors.
He told LBC of his surprise that there was no regulation.
“I, along with most members of the public, automatically assumed ‘surely this can’t happen because there’s all these measures and scrutiny in place?’
“Actually, that’s not the case. Families want change; they don’t want anything like this to happen again, and that can only be driven by government.”
Bush was not a member of the National Association of Funeral Directors, and that lack of regulation meant he could run the home as he pleased.
Andrew Judd is the Chief Executive of the NAFD. He says they want regulation to be brought in because the current set-up is not fair on the families.
“Great trust and confidence is placed in funeral directors. However, there is a place where currently, funeral directors can operate without any scrutiny.
“We would like to see directors operating under a licence. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There is already statutory regulation in Scotland. We already have a code of practise that works, and we would like all funeral directors to subscribe to that code.”
A mandatory code of practice was introduced in March 2025, under which inspectors can force compliance.
Refrigeration areas must be kept clean, and funeral directors must be transparent about where bodies are being kept.
Indeed, what happened in Hull is not the first case to prompt calls for proper regulation in the profession.
Richard Elkin and Hayley Bell, who ran a funeral home in Gosport, were jailed in February this year after the discovery of two bodies in an uncooled, leaking mortuary in December 2023.
A subsequent investigation found that between June 2022 and December 2023, 46 bodies had been kept in these conditions, in some instances for more than a month.
They were each given four-year sentences for fraudulent trading, intentionally causing a public nuisance, and preventing the lawful and decent burial of a dead body.
Last year, bereaved parents in Leeds were horrified to find the bodies of their babies had been taken home by a worker at a local funeral director in the city.
Cody and Liam Townend were among those who found their baby daughter Macie-Mae in the house.
“Macie-Mae was lying there around their animals and their children. We contacted police but they told us there’s nothing they could do.” Explains Cody.
“The funeral director was really good with Macie-Mae in the hospital. She did fingerprints and footprints with her. But then she got the wrong date to pick her up from the morgue.
“She told us we could see her the next day, which we did, but we never got to spend time with her again until we took her away.”
“We want regulation, so no one else has to go through what we did”, Liam says. “We’ll have some peace of mind once regulations are in place.”
West Yorkshire Police have previously said there was no criminality in this particular case.
The Fuller Report, published in July last year, was commissioned to overhaul the security, governance, and dignity of the deceased across hospitals, local authorities, and the funeral sector.
It concluded the funeral sector in England was an unregulated free-for-all.
Recommendations include the need for licensing, mandatory inspections and the powers of prosecution.
A government spokesperson said: “The majority of the recommendations have been accepted with a full response to be published later this year.”
Families want action sooner rather than later, to make sure that nothing like what happened in Hull, Gosport or Leeds is repeated.