Do We Really Need A Quango To Stop Necrophilia?

What the police walked into on Hessle Road was beyond comprehension. A cold storage room, bodies on racks along both walls, most of them uncovered, in varying states of decomposition. A naked body on a stretcher on the floor. Two more lying on the floor of the cold room itself. Human putrefaction visible across the tiles, and in the corner a mop and bucket containing more of it.

Some of the dead still wore hospital identity bracelets on a wrist or an ankle. Some wore biological hazard bracelets. Some had nothing on them at all to say who they were, and no register existed anywhere on the premises to say who was in the building.

The bodycam footage illustrates the officers' confusion.

The expert report tells the rest.

None had been washed. None had been dressed. Several lay in pools of their own fluids. Elsewhere in the building there was a heap of accumulated clothing, the outfits families had chosen for their mothers and husbands to be cremated in, never used. There was a pile of family photographs meant to have gone into coffins.

Boxes of ashes were scattered through the rooms with no system of any kind for recording or identifying them. Ceilings were collapsing. Rooms were damp and mouldy. There was excrement on a lavatory floor.

One of the dead had been there since April 2023. The police opened the doors a year later in March 2024.

Undertaker Robert Bush was in Arizona at the time, on holiday.

20 Years, 67 Offences, 30 Bodies

Mr Justice Hilliard sentenced him on 31 July 2026 to twenty years for sixty-seven offences, committed over twelve years, on what the prosecution called an industrial scale. The judge said he had never known offences to affect so many people, and so many people so deeply. He heard around 240 personal statements.

You won't read a lot of it on the BBC.

• In twenty of the thirty cases, families had already been handed ashes and told the cremation had gone ahead, while the body sat on a rack a few miles away.
• Forty or so families in a further group of fifty-seven waited more than a month for a cremation they believed had already happened, in some cases 141 days, 156, 167, 178, 201, and 266.
• Forty-six of those fifty-seven were given the wrong ashes.
• Eleven were given none at all, and some were eventually handed an empty plastic bag or a teaspoon of ash the police had managed to recover for them.

Four counts concerned babies of between seven and eighteen weeks' gestation.

Baby Sunny had been brought to Legacy for cremation and remained there almost two years, in a paper bag on the floor. When officers found him, they thought at first they had come across a little bird. His mother had believed she had him at home.

Baby Ness's mother was given an urn before the correct ashes had even been collected, and those ashes have never been recovered; when police examined the urn's contents, they found wadding, some fragments of bone, and ash which an expert judged to be an adult's.

Meanwhile Bush sold funeral plans to 226 people who paid him £562,117 on the understanding it would be held securely with an insurer. None of it was. The money went into his personal accounts and his wife's. Just over three million pounds passed through the Legacy and personal accounts between 2017 and 2024.

He stole at least £5,540 from collection plates intended for twelve charities, the Salvation Army and Macmillan among them. He told police the bodies had not been cremated because of cash flow problems, and the judge rejected that entirely and without hesitation, observing there had been no problem with the flow of the cash, only with the direction of it. He reused coffins people had already paid for. He switched off refrigeration units to economise.

Unless a body was among the thirty recovered in March 2024, nobody who used Legacy at any point in twelve years can know what happened to their relative or whose ashes are on their mantelpiece. Hundreds of urns across Hull and Beverley are now permanently unattributable. Ashes were scattered at meaningful places. Ashes were set into jewellery and worn.

None of it can be undone by any court, and the judge said so plainly.

Within a day of sentencing, the Health Secretary announced proposals for regulation of the funeral sector, described Bush's conduct as utterly abhorrent, and confirmed cross-government work with the Ministry of Justice and a Law Commission review.

The Telegraph letters page filled up. Parliament must act. Risks can clearly no longer be taken. Statutory licensing at last.

SIR – After the sentencing of the Legacy funeral director Robert Bush (report, August 1), Yvette Cooper, the Health Secretary, said: “In the wake of this horrific case, we will now bring forward comprehensive proposals to ensure respect and dignity for the deceased in every setting, including proper regulation of the funeral sector.”

I am the expert witness who worked on the case and whose report was cited during the course of the sentencing hearing last week.

In his final report on David Fuller – the double murderer who sexually assaulted multiple corpses – published on July 15 last year, Sir Jonathan Michael, the inquiry chairman, recommended: “The UK Government should establish an independent statutory regulatory regime for funeral directors in England as a matter of urgency in order to safeguard the security and dignity of the deceased.”

However, despite the Fuller report – and now the Legacy case – there are still no statutory licencing or registration requirements for funeral directors in England, Wales or Northern Ireland, and there is no legal need for any funeral worker to hold or train for any qualifications for either employment or business ownership. In addition, I estimate that about 2,000 of the 7,000 funeral firms trading in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are not registered with either of the existing (voluntary) trade organisations.

On Friday, Andy Burnham, the Prime Minister, backed calls for regulation, citing the recommendations of the Fuller Report. The time has now come to address this matter once and for all, in order that more families do not suffer the heartache to which Bush has subjected the people of Hull.

Dr Richard Lloyd
Fellow in anatomy, Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge

SIR – The whole nation will have been horrified by the case of Robert Bush, the Hull funeral director. Clearly the argument for regulation of the funeral industry across the UK (Scotland already has provision) must be heeded.

As a clergyman, I have always found my undertaker colleagues to be courteous and professional in the extreme. However, risks can clearly no longer be taken and Parliament needs to act to create a proper legal framework for the profession.

Rev Andrew McLuskey
Ashford, Middlesex

This instinct, of the British political class needing to do something in the face of public moral outrage, is ancient, and profoundly difficult. It is part of the reason our country is a dystopian hellscape of soviet administrators.

We must regulate. We must administrate. Something must be done about this outrage so we feel like something is being done, even if nothing can be done to stop this happening.

Registrars Already Had The Means Of Detection

The judge did something unusual in his remarks. He asked how Bush got away with it for so long. He said it was not his task to answer, and then went looking anyway because the families wanted to know.

His first finding is the one the campaign for a regulator relies on.

There were no checks whatever over many years, and no oversight at all of the conditions in which the deceased were kept. A single visit might have been enough to stop some of it. Even the prospect of a single visit might have meant some of it never began.

His second finding has gone almost entirely unreported, and it dismantles the case being built on the first.

Under the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953, when a relative reports a death the registrar issues a certificate for burial or cremation. Part of that certificate is supposed to come back, completed by whoever carried out the disposal, confirming when and where it happened.

The registrar is supposed to check for outstanding returns. Where a return does not arrive, the registrar is supposed to contact the General Register Office.

In every one of these cases, the relevant part was never returned. Nobody chased a single one of them. Nobody contacted the General Register Office.

Britain has possessed, for seventy-three years, a statutory tripwire designed for precisely this. A death is registered, a certificate goes out, and a piece of paper comes back to say the body has been dealt with.

Thirty bodies were rotting on Hessle Road with thirty missing returns sitting unexamined in a municipal system. The mechanism did not fail because it was too weak, or because the funeral trade was insufficiently professionalised, or because there was no register of approved undertakers. It failed because it required somebody, somewhere, to notice a gap in a list, and nobody was doing it.

Asked about this, Hull City Council and East Riding of Yorkshire Council told the court it was "not clear," in their view, whether following the procedure would have changed the outcome.

That single sentence is worth more than the entire regulatory debate. Confronted with an unused detection system already sitting in statute, the administrative answer is to doubt the system would have worked, and to request a new one with a chief executive.

It also failed to mention how quangocrats from the council looked at this repulsive chap and missed it on repeated occasions.

Fuller & Savile Attacked Inside the Most Regulated Settings in Britain

Anyone who thinks the answer is more machinery should look at what the machinery achieved in Kent. This was not the first bizarre and horrific case where noticing disgusting behaviour was suggested for outsourcing to a quango so nobody else had to.

David Fuller, an electrical maintenance supervisor, sexually abused the bodies of at least 101 women and girls between 2005 and 2020. The youngest was nine. The oldest was one hundred. He returned to the same bodies repeatedly. He consulted the mortuary logbooks to check which of the dead had carried infectious diseases before deciding what to do with them. He locked himself into the post-mortem room.

In a single year he entered a mortuary 440 times, and the inquiry found the frequency went unnoticed and unchecked because little regard was given to who was walking in.

His setting was Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Foundation Trust, with a board, a governance committee structure, employment checks, access policies, a Care Quality Commission registration, and a mortuary operating under a Human Tissue Authority licence with a designated individual personally accountable under the Human Tissue Act 2004.

Senior management knew there were problems in the running of that mortuary from 2008 onwards. Bodies were being left out of the fridges overnight. Jonathan Michael found little evidence of effective remedy, and found comparable weaknesses elsewhere in the country.

Fuller was caught in 2020 when forensic advances let a cold case team match him to the murders of Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce, killed in Tunbridge Wells in 1987.

Officers went to his house looking for evidence about two women murdered under Margaret Thatcher, and found four million images of what he had been doing to the dead.

An earlier chance had already been thrown away.

In an admission which beggars belief, Fuller himself said he wouldn't have tried it if there had been something as simple as CCTV.

It said a “significant number” of NHS trusts did not have CCTV cameras inside the mortuary – despite Fuller admitting he would not have carried out his abuse had there been CCTV cameras pointing at the body fridges.

The Savile investigations of 2014 and 2015 documented suspicions of corpse abuse at Leeds General Infirmary, and nothing followed anywhere in the health service.

At no point did the existence or non-existence of quangos change anything at all.

5000 Bones In A Worcestershire Farmhouse

Derek McMinn was the most celebrated hip surgeon in Britain, charging thirteen thousand pounds an operation at a private hospital in Edgbaston. He was described by one member of staff as the goose which laid the golden egg.

A leaked internal report alleged he had retained at least 5,224 bones and tissue samples taken from patients across twenty-five years; some of them at his farmhouse near Stourbridge, along with patient notes and X-rays.

He claimed verbal consent.

Investigators found no record of such a conversation with any patient, no licence to retain human tissue, no permission to conduct research, and no evidence any research had ever been done.

NHS staff knew and assisted.

An audit between 2010 and 2015 had already identified the storage of femoral heads and reminded the hospital of its obligations. The collecting continued.

The Human Tissue Authority exists because of the horrors of the Alder Hey organ scandal. Parliament built a national regulator for the express purpose of preventing the unconsented retention of body parts.

It didn't work. Bureaucracy didn't stop a mad scientist. It didn't stop necrophiles either.

Fifteen years into its life, the largest alleged retention scandal in modern British history was accumulating inside a registered, inspected, audited hospital, and it surfaced when somebody handed a document to a journalist.

How Britain's Worst Cases Were Discovered

Not one was ended by routine inspection. Every one was ended by a person: a daughter, a detective, a journalist, a colleague, a stranger who picked up the telephone.

In several instances the regulator already held the relevant information and filed it.

The assumption beneath the campaign for a funerals regulator has never been stated aloud, because stating it would expose it.

The assumption is scheduled inspection detects concealed criminality.

It should do, according to British theory.

British experience says inspection reliably detects one thing, which is the absence of paperwork about criminality. Bush kept almost no records at all, and for twelve years no living soul asked him for any.

Regulators Are For Deferring The Truth

The official logic and argumentation for regulating – that is, reducing the unstable voltage of something by lowering its speed and gatekeeping – runs something like as follows:

1. Something unspeakable happens.
2. The occupation involved turns out not to be comprehensively regulated.
3. Therefore comprehensive regulation would have prevented it.

This is obviously fallacious in multiple ways.

The middle step does no work whatever, but it produces the answer the political class needs, because a regulatory failure implies a ministerial remedy, and a ministerial remedy can be announced on the courthouse steps for politicians who want to survive until Friday.

Announcement is the entire product. The minister's fear is not recurrence, which will land on a successor in a decade. The fear is the accusation of having done nothing this week.

A new body is visible, emotionally legible, and impossible to oppose in the days after a sentencing, since anyone raising an objection can be portrayed as indifferent to desecrated corpses and weeping mothers.

The horror performs the legislative work. The more monstrous the case, the less scrutiny the proposed machinery receives, which is a perfect inversion of how public money ought to be spent.

What ministers cannot say, and what every one of them privately knows, is short enough to fit on a postcard.

The state cannot administrate evil out of existence.

• A licence does not restrain a man already willing to leave a baby in a paper bag on a floor for two years.
• A qualification does not screen out a necrophile.
• A code of practice is not consulted at two in the morning in an unlit back room.

Wickedness of this depth is concealed by design, and concealment defeats scheduled inspection more or less by definition.

Nobody at the despatch box will say it, because the British public in the aftermath of an atrocity does not want candour. It wants reassurance, and the political class has long since discovered reassurance can be manufactured at a cost of forty million a year plus premises.

The template is the Care Quality Commission, reviewed in 2024 by Dr Penny Dash, who found around one in five of the locations it may inspect had never received a rating at all; an average rating age of 3.7 years; an oldest social care rating dating from 2015; inspectors who had never set foot in a hospital; and care home inspectors who had never met a person with dementia.

The then Health Secretary described the body responsible for identifying failure as not fit for purpose.

Scotland, meanwhile, legislated for funeral director licensing in 2016 after its own infant ashes scandals. It appointed inspectors in 2020, brought a mandatory code into force in 2025, and as of this summer is still working on the licensing scheme itself.

A decade from atrocity to an unfinished register is the realistic offer.

And it has, to date, detected nothing at all.

Burke, Hare, And Britain's First Corpse Inspectorate

The instinct is not modern, and it is not the fault of any particular party. It is imperial, the habit of a state which spent two centuries convincing itself no disorder anywhere existed which could not be met by appointing a resident, an inspector, or a board.

In 1828, Edinburgh discovered William Burke and William Hare had murdered sixteen people and sold the bodies to the anatomist Robert Knox. Hare turned King's evidence. Burke was hanged in January 1829 and, with a certain grim symmetry, publicly dissected.

Parliament then produced the Anatomy Act 1832, creating Inspectors of Anatomy and a licensing system for those who cut up the dead.

The Act did not prevent the murders, which had been answered by a rope. It solved the anatomists' supply problem, by permitting the unclaimed bodies of the destitute (those who died in workhouses with nobody to pay for a funeral) to be handed over for dissection.

The regulatory response to the murder of the poor was to make the corpses of the poor legally available. Nobody wealthy was ever at risk from either arrangement.

HM Inspector of Anatomy still exists in Scotland. In December 2025, responding to the Fuller inquiry, the Human Tissue Authority published updated guidance to ensure adverse incidents in the anatomy sector are properly recorded.

133 years of inspectorate, and the deliverable is a better incident log.

The Fuller inquiry made seventy-five recommendations. By the government's interim update last December, eleven had been accepted in full, forty-three in principle, and twenty-one remained under consideration.

Among the eleven full acceptances was an agreement by NHS England to start collecting data, for the first time, on the conveyance of deceased patients in ambulances. Because all technocrats know how to do is create a dashboard and claim it is a solution to a problem.

A man sexually attacked a hundred corpses inside the National Health Service across fifteen years, and one of the concrete wins is a spreadsheet about hearses.

Is The Government Needed For Funerals?

A serious answer exists, and it costs almost nothing. Two trade associations (the National Association of Funeral Directors and Funeral Suppliers’ Association) already inspect the premises of their members and already publish codes. Roughly five thousand of the seven thousand firms in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland belong to one or the other.

This is the same type of self-correcting organisation to be yet again bulldozed by the WWI total state like the mutual and friendly societies.

1. Give those codes statutory force;
2. Make membership or an equivalent bonded guarantee a condition of receiving a body from a hospital, a coroner, or a registrar, and;
3. Require the associations to admit an unannounced visit to any member premises on pain of expulsion.

A funeral director outside the arrangement may still trade, and may still be chosen, in the same way an uninsured builder may still trade, with the consequence advertised.

None of this is the business of the state. At all.

And it is not the business of moral busybodies within national broadcasters to legislate from the newsroom.

Then make the existing tripwire bite.

A disposal return which fails to come back within a fixed period generates an automatic query from the registrar, and a second failure generates a visit. This is a database rule and one clerk, not an executive agency.

Environmental health officers already hold rights of entry, already inspect kitchens and butchers, and can be given an express power over funeral premises in a single clause.

Client money for pre-paid plans belongs in a segregated account under existing financial law, and a director who moves it into his wife's account should face the offence he already faces, prosecuted faster.

Every item there attaches to a physical object, a piece of paper, or a named human being who goes to prison.

None of it requires a chief executive on a hundred and eighty thousand a year, a chair, a board, a strategy document, a stakeholder engagement function, a diversity statement, or an annual levy on family businesses in market towns which have buried the same families for four generations.

There is a deeper reason for restraint, beyond cost.

The state's proper interest in a corpse is narrow and largely already exercised. It registers the death, it certifies the cause, it satisfies itself through the coroner when the cause is unclear, it authorises disposal, and it prosecutes those who interfere with the dead.

These are sensible functions. No more are required.

Everything beyond them belongs to the family, the church, and the community, which is where the care of the dead has resided in this country since long before there was a Department of Health to take an interest.

The government has quite enough access to our bodies while we are alive, as mass house arrest during lockdown demonstrated fully.

Extending its administrative reach past the point of death, in exchange for no demonstrated gain in detection, is a poor trade for a people who used to bury their own.

They Must Hang, Minister

Which provision would the offender have obeyed, at what moment, and by what mechanism would his disobedience have been seen?

Not whether licensing sounds reassuring. Not whether Scotland has legislated. Not whether the respectable end of the trade would enjoy the dignity of professional status, which it certainly would, and which is the reason the trade bodies have welcomed the announcement so warmly.

For Robert Bush the honest answer is a registrar noticing thirty missing death forms in 2023, or an environmental health officer opening a cold room door at any point in twelve years.

Both powers existed. Neither was used. A quango doesn't fix it.

For David Fuller the honest answer is a lock, an access log somebody reads, and a manager willing to ask why an electrician has been into the mortuary 400 times.

For Derek McMinn the honest answer is a consent form and an auditor unafraid of a famous surgeon. And maybe some NHS staff whistleblowing – and we know what the NHS does to them when they try.

None of those answers is a quango.

All of them are a person doing a job which was already theirs.

Obviously the ultimate penalty must be re-introduced carefully for these individuals. They are morally irredeemable, there is no question of innocence, and the only thing left is paying for their upkeep in a cage while a human rights solicitor attempts to make his name getting their convictions quashed.

England has always had a remedy for evil once guilt has been established. It is quick, effective, relatively painless, and enacts society's revenge and disgracing of the perpetrator as our catharsis. The method is induced fracture of the axis-second cervical vertebra. These men should not be folded into administrative quarters for a few decades.

They must hang.

Even they know, as Englishmen – albeit the worst kind – they must hang for what they have done. When even the murderer or necrophile knows, MPs should. This is not an intellectual matter. It is a moral one. The ancient cultural depth of the penalty meets the depth of the evil. It is deep in English bones. Hanging is our method because it involves publicly disgracing the evil for their deeds. Evil must be met with its death.

The alternative is now more or less certain with a Labour government serving a civil service ever-desperate for more estate until it has achieved perfect Soviet administration over all aspects of British life: there will be a regulator, a levy, a code running to ninety pages, and a promise this can never happen again. Costs for families will be massively increased when they are passed on from the regulatory burden by the director and suppliers.

In due course a licensed funeral director will do something unspeakable, the inspection file will be found to be in immaculate order, and a minister will rise again at the despatch box to say lessons need to be learned and the regulator's powers must be strengthened.

The families in Hull will get a body with a logo. What they wanted was for somebody, anybody, to open the door and do their duty.