Christina Martin often starts her day by slowly cracking open the front door of someone she has never met. Her next move will be decided by the smell.
With a bit of luck, she may be met by nothing more than the subtle hint of rotting food. But depending on how long it has been since anyone had entered the property, the stench may overpower her—an odious cocktail of rotten meat, expired milk and human remains wafting through the narrow gap in the doorway.
As a local authority officer working in environmental health, Martin’s job is a far cry from typical council work. She is charged with scheduling Section 46 funerals—more commonly known as public health funerals, or paupers’ funerals. These are basic burials paid for by the local authority when the next of kin are unable or unwilling to make the necessary arrangements for a funeral, or when next of kin cannot be found.
Many councils pride themselves in making Section 46 funerals indistinguishable from any other funeral. Yet, with one in five councils in the UK reporting they are “likely” to declare effective bankruptcy in the next 15 months, funeral expenses are one of the first things to be trimmed. This might mean no music, no celebrant and, in some cases, no service at all. Already, according to a report published by the charity Quaker Social Action (QSA) in July, “more than half of councils in England and Wales are likely not fully following guidelines on public health funerals”.
Still, the demand grows. In May, Sky News reported a 23 per cent rise in public health funerals between 2018 and 2023, in nearly two-thirds of English councils. Areas such as Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole saw a 387 per cent increase in demand, and the London borough of Enfield reported a 250 per cent increase. This leaves little breathing room for local authority officers, who must balance the rising demand with the need to ensure a dignified send-off.
Martin could never have predicted this future for herself when she was a young stand-up comedian, trekking around the London circuit in the early 2000s. When comedy failed to keep the lights on, she took a job as a personal assistant for a domineering CEO—commuting from Surrey to the capital. By 2018, enough was enough. Martin headed south for Bexhill-on-Sea. The only gig in town that matched her skillset was the council. So, at 38, she took up a job as a technical support officer in environmental health for Rother and Wealden councils.
Six years in public health has earned Martin a strong stomach. As one of the first on the scene when a body is discovered, her first task will be to empty the fridge and freezer of a home that may not have been entered in several months.
“There’ll be maggots, there’ll be blood, and there’ll be a visible stain where the person was,” she says.
In one case, Martin entered a home where the deceased had had their power cut three months earlier: “There was fresh dog food in the fridge, meat in the freezer and a half pint of milk that was ready to explode.”
Moments like these can be hard to forget for local authority officers, and certain cases stay with them for life. David Lockwood, who previously managed three public health funeral teams in London, still remembers his first case three decades ago. Entering the small bungalow in Greenwich, on a sweltering London afternoon, Lockwood discovered the homeowner had died with the heating on.
“It was a concrete building and he’d been there for a few weeks,” he says. “He had gone everywhere, bless him. We think he came from Egypt, but we couldn’t prove it because we just couldn’t find any paperwork for him. Nobody’s ever found his next of kin.”
Scraps of paperwork, fragments of the deceased’s life, can be pieced together to unlock an entire identity. Sometimes it takes a few minutes. Occasionally it can result in an investigation that takes local authority officers several weeks. Much of this investigative work has been detailed in Martin’s 2023 memoir, Ashes to Admin: Tales from the Caseload of a Council Funeral Officer, written under her pen name Evie King. Phone numbers found in fruit bowls can lead to cousins, birthday cards with legible signatures might help find an aunt, and a Facebook search often turns up estranged children.
The council initially seeks to locate family members to pay for the funeral. If this is impossible, Martin hopes to find a family member willing merely to attend the funeral and take possession of the estate. Time limits, however, can be tight in some councils. Martin’s maximum research time rarely exceeds six weeks.
“If there’s no next of kin and HM Treasury can’t trace someone, all their money goes to the government. We want to get that money to the people who are related to them if we can,” Martin says.
These are high-stakes investigations, where one error can cause great pain because, if a public health funeral officer fails to identify the family of the dead, and fails to prevent the estate from trickling into the government purse, then what, really, is left of a life?
Dignity in death
When the time comes to inform relatives of a death, local authority officers face a task few could bear—and with no official standardised sensitivity training.
“We learn on the go, and what I find works is being direct. So, as well as being sensitive to it, you have to introduce it very quickly,” Martin says.
Her opening line? “Hello, my name is Christina, I’m calling from the council. I’m sorry to tell you, but your relative has died.”
It is easy to imagine Martin in this position. From her years performing for aloof London crowds, she has a way of reading emotions—knowing how to adapt her language around sensitive topics. This is necessary, evidently, as she says the responses are seldom predictable: often, family members have chosen to be estranged from the deceased.
“Sometimes it’s very businesslike. I advised one guy not to go into the house because the scene of his brother’s death was quite bloody. He said, ‘How did he die?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know the coroner’s ruling, but it looked like he died on his own at home with some illness.’ He said: ‘Yeah, probably died of a stiff upper lip—that’s what our family is like.’”
In other cases, Martin is moved by the reactions of loved ones. After a lady in her constituency died in a care home, she got in touch with an ex-husband of 16 years. While she had been in hospital, they had reconnected—only to reignite some forgotten feelings.
“I started visiting her when I heard she was ill, we’d fallen in love again and we wanted to get back together,” he told her, “then she died.”
These conversations, which Martin says can last for hours, are not compulsory. In fact, there is no legal requirement for local authority officers to locate next of kin at all before burials or cremations take place. The government’s best practice guidance merely advises that a “reasonable attempt” is made to do so—leaving plenty of room for individual interpretation. But Martin’s approach is a way of ensuring there is dignity in death.
Depending on how well the service is funded, this responsibility can rest with one member of the council or an entire team. Austerity cuts mean councils have to be creative with budgets. While environmental health officers once performed this role, Martin’s council has assimilated several roles under broader titles, such as “technical support officer”. When Martin is not clearing up decomposing bodies, you may find her posting on the council’s Instagram or organising bin collections. The department that deals with the cases varies too: from Social Care to Cemeteries and Crematoria, from Environmental Health to Housing—and, in some councils, Waste Disposal.
“It’s a square peg with a round hole,” says Lockwood, recalling his time in London’s local authorities. “Nobody knows what to do with it. When you talk to senior people in councils, they just don’t understand what’s going on. They know that they’ve got to do [public health funerals], but they don’t understand what these people are doing, and what lengths they are going to try to find next of kin.”
With such a wide variety of approaches across councils, ensuring that a “reasonable attempt” is made to locate families can be a vague, anxiety-inducing burden. For Mike Birkinshaw, CEO of the Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities (FBCA), who worked in local authority bereavement services for 11 years, the pressure was gruelling.
“There’s always that thing in the back of your mind of whether there really is somebody somewhere. Have I done enough to try to find people?” he says.
“Because once you’ve conducted a funeral, there’s no opportunity to do that again.”
This is a lesson he learned the hard way—when he took the role of contract, compliance and operations bereavement team leader for Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council, and the council’s coroner asked him to cremate a man’s body that had been held for two years.
Birkinshaw looked through the case history, not finding a single family member who had come forward since the man had died. So, wanting to “make my mark” as a new employee, he decided to go ahead with a cremation.
“It honestly sends chills down my spine even talking about it now,” he says. The day after the funeral, the phone rang, with the Coroner’s Office on the other end: “We’ve still got all his personal effects, including the stuff that his partner dropped off. Will you be dealing with that?” At that moment, says Birkinshaw, his world fell apart.
While the onus is technically on the living relatives to come forward and claim the deceased, it was inevitably up to Birkinshaw to relay this miscommunication. “Ultimately, I had to ring that lady, and I had to take her partner’s ashes to her,” he says.
“Her biggest problem was the fact that her daughter would never be able to attend her dad’s funeral. That’s why, in those emotive circumstances, delays happen—it’s so final.”
The postcode lottery
Cases such as these, where families fall victim to admin errors, are not uncommon in public health funerals. Section 46 allows stark flexibility in how these funerals are delivered, meaning that from one borough to the next residents can experience vastly different standards of practice.
In the best-case scenario, public health funerals take approximately 15 minutes, and are led by a celebrant or a religious representative. The council will provide a funeral director, a hearse and a basic coffin (usually chipboard veneer or medium-density fibreboard). If found, the family will have input at the service, choosing readings and music. Councils are unlikely to provide orders of service or flowers.
The QSA report highlighted “good practice” in areas such as Camden, where the council offers a religious or non-religious service and sufficient bearers to transfer the coffin to the chapel. Given sufficient notice, Sefton Council in Merseyside provides music, a coffin with a brass name plaque, and the family can send details about the deceased person for the celebrant to write the eulogy. Brighton and Hove Council provides silk flowers for the casket.
Yet in most councils, even if these provisions have not already been cut, the coming year offers little hope for improving the service.
“Birmingham City Council—where they spend around £1m a year on these—are bankrupt. If you’re having to cut everything bar your absolute social care needs, I don’t think 15-minute funeral services will survive,” Martin says.
“You’ve got to wonder: when’s the axe going to come? I can totally see how people would then take that Section 46 legislation and go, ‘well, we don’t have to go above and beyond—Section 46 just says bury or cremate.’”
Many councils have already stopped public health funerals in all but name. In 2020 a report released by Royal London, an organisation committed to tackling funeral poverty in the UK, found that 21 local councils failed to return ashes to bereaved families after a public health funeral. A further 18 councils charge bereaved families for the luxury, and 14 local councils do not allow family members to attend the ceremony in the first place. Four years on, QSA found that only a quarter of English councils that provided online information clearly stated that ashes can be collected if wished, without mention of any restrictions.
This scattergun method, dubbed “bad practice” by several interviewees, can bleed into even the most basic provision of public health funerals.
“Some councils I’ve spoken to just do the funeral; they don’t even search the property. I said, ‘How do you know if they’ve got an estate?’ and they said ‘Well, we haven’t got time to do it. We’ve got so many other things to do’—which I found crazy,” says Lockwood.
“There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Some councils will cremate, some councils will bury into a public grave, and some councils in the past have buried into private graves. People have come forward and said ‘No, he didn’t want to be cremated, he wants to be buried,’ but people are still being cremated anyway.
“There’s no standard, there’s no median level you can get—it’s a postcode lottery.”
The scale of the problem is staggering, with “bad practice” cropping up everywhere. Royal London found that across the UK, from Aberdeenshire to Doncaster, Nottingham City to Gloucester City, councils are charging families for the return of ashes. Their motives for doing so, according to Martin, are unclear.
“It’s not something that costs us any money. So, we give them for free, obviously, why wouldn’t we? We don’t want to keep them; they’ll just be sitting there. We want people to have their ashes, and we don’t want to charge.”
The greatest pain lies in the cases of families that are actively prevented from attending services.
“It costs nothing, so I don’t get that whatsoever. If you’re having it, open the doors. It’s even more cruel if you know your family member is having a funeral, and you can’t go.”
A shroud of secrecy cloaks many public health funerals in the UK. In London, few councils offer a database of when these funerals are scheduled. Hackney Council cited “practical reasons” as to why the schedule for the upcoming month was not available and ignored follow-up emails. Hounslow Council only publishes some basic information (gender, date of birth, place of death) on those availing of the service after the funeral has already happened. Kingston upon Thames, Westminster Council, Lewisham Council, Camden Council, Sutton Council and Haringey Council all said they did not publish an online database for when public health funerals are held. Hillingdon Council recommended a Freedom of Information request to access this information. The remaining 23 London boroughs did not respond to requests.
For those who work in the sector, it often proves difficult to obtain any information from councils about public health funeral scheduling, even for celebrants who are willing to perform the ceremonies free of charge.
For the past few months, this has been troubling Jane Morgan, a north London celebrant and director of The Good Funeral Guide. She joined the profession in 2012, following a 25-year stint in the voluntary sector working with vulnerable young people and with those experiencing loss and trauma.
“I am currently liaising with the local authority about a person who’s died locally who nobody knew bar the neighbour,” she says. “We’re trying to work with the local authority to have a funeral of some sort.”
Morgan chooses her words carefully. For her, a funeral is a collaborative experience which should represent the interests of dying and bereaved people. At the Good Funeral Guide, she and the team “hold strong views about the importance of funerals and the transformative power that a truly personal funeral ceremony can have”.
This ideal begins to falter when the lines of communication with local authorities are fraught. Now, she finds herself having to undertake investigations just to perform her job.
“We’re finding it very hard to get any information from the local authority. This person died at the end of last year and we told them that we would like to be involved in organising. We know it’ll be a minimal funeral; we know that they’ll be given 15 minutes at a crematorium for us to attend.
“I’ve said that I will lead that ceremony, but for all we know that funeral may have happened. This is five months on so the coroner will have been involved. We don’t know where the body is. We don’t know what’s happened to them.”
Humans will always look to “create some sort of remembrance”, Martin asserts, so where local authorities fail, communities do step in. This is evident in bankrupt councils like Birmingham City, where the closing of a library has led to local people maintaining the service for free.
“I’d hope that the responsibility wouldn’t have to be put on the already creaking community that has got enough on their plate, running the library and the youth centre and tending to the flowerbeds,” Morgan says.
In any case, there are just some services that can’t be depended on for volunteer-led work.
“We can’t rely on goodwill, because we might be burying someone who committed loads of crimes or outraged public decency. So, we do need that very neutral service that’s provided by the government.”
In the Lancashire borough of Burnley, this transfer to the voluntary sector has already begun. Frustrated and disheartened by exhausting bureaucracy, Pastor Mick Fleming and the team at the Church on the Street, a religious charity fighting poverty in the north-west, took it upon themselves to fund local funerals.
“I’ve tried to access a public health funeral to do it for somebody else. It’s been horrendous,” explains Pastor Fleming.
“We rang the main Burnley Borough Council number and were transferred, and no one answered on several occasions. We rang back and were given a new number—no answer. I rang the cemetery and got no response. It’s absolutely insane. I couldn’t do it, so never mind someone who is grieving.”
According to Pastor Fleming, the grieving partner of the deceased had already been trying to contact the council for four weeks. Church on the Street was her last resort.
“I think it’s difficult for a reason, because it’s so expensive to do. The councils are limited as to price, and they want to do as few as possible. Basically, it’s easier to not answer the phone.”
This is backed up by research. The expansive QSA report found that of the 102 councils it surveyed, more than a third had no information online for the public about council funeral provision. Of the 66 councils that did have information, over a quarter provided no contact details for those needing to notify their local authority about a death requiring a council funeral.
Things got even more complicated over the phone. The report found that phone calls to 54 councils showed the “unnecessarily labyrinthine journey” grieving people have to go through to reach the right department at some authorities. Only a third of the correct departments were reached in one call. When QSA was able to conclude the calls, nearly a quarter of councils turned the request away or presented significant barriers.
Part of Church on the Street’s work is to pay for the funerals of people in the community who either do not qualify for the Funeral Expenses Payment (a government grant which rarely covers the funeral costs) or cannot organise a public health funeral. The funding comes directly from Pastor Fleming’s church and local donations.
As the bills rack up, costing the organisation an average of £1,800 per funeral, Pastor Fleming and his team face a difficult decision: with their budgets tightening, they must deny many people the financial assistance they require to properly bury their loved ones.
“We can’t respond to the demand; we only have a set amount of money,” he says.
“That’s been pretty heartbreaking... It’s almost like saying, ‘Well, you’re on your own, there’s nowt I can do.’ It’s sad, it’s really, really sad.”
When public health funerals do happen in his borough, Pastor Fleming says the council does not provide a celebrant, and the family of the deceased are not permitted to choose the two classical songs that play.
“Eight miles away in Accrington, I can go, for free, and I can do a service at a public health funeral. I can’t do that in Burnley—they drop the deceased off, and they can have two songs and then that’s it,” says Pastor Fleming.
“Literally around the corner, I did a public health funeral for somebody. I didn’t think I could do it because I can’t in Burnley. But I went in, and they got a proper service.”
Burnley Borough Council said it is “a little confused” by the issues that Pastor Fleming has raised.
“He has conducted at least one service at Burnley Crematorium when a member of his congregation received a public funeral. If he wants to provide a service in future for someone he knew, we could and would accommodate that if it was in accordance with their wishes.
“We take a consistent approach to the format of public health services, taking into account any faith requirements, so that each recipient receives the same service. The utmost respect is afforded to the arrangements and to any family or friends wishing to attend. We understand that it is a sensitive time for everyone involved and we take a professional and respectful approach as befits the situation.”
In Scotland, the founders of the Lonely Funerals Project—poet Andy Jackson and celebrant Michael Hannah—have launched a volunteer-led initiative aimed at enhancing the quality of public health funerals in their region. Based on the work of a Dutch poetry collective, Jackson and Hannah perform poetry for people who would otherwise have no one at their public health funerals. Their poetry creates stories out of fragments—a photograph, a passport, a police report.
Hannah and Jackson are a well-matched pair. In his mid-sixties, Hannah came to celebrancy late in life, but says it is his true vocation. A natural storyteller, he feels the power of poetry and spoken word are essential for his work. There is an almost dreamlike quality to the way he speaks, his voice soft and melodic.
Jackson is the more analytical of the two. He easily recalls details, emotions and quotes from the past in minute detail, making for astute graveside readings.
But, despite their passion, their obvious fit for the role and the seemingly uncontroversial nature of the project, Hannah and Jackson have faced the same bullheadedness from the managerial classes in Scotland. It took months of persistence, and endless unanswered emails, for Dundee Council to allow the pair to attend their first funeral.
“The environmental health people had said it was too complicated, and that they didn’t want to get involved in it,” says Jackson. “Eventually, somebody somewhere passed our communication to one of the social work teams in Dundee who got in touch.”
The council arranged for Jackson and Hannah to perform at the funeral of an elderly resident, Derek, who died in a care home. He had no living next of kin. In the outskirts of Dundee, by Derek’s graveside, Hannah stepped forward to read a poem he had written in two days, based on the few biographical details the council could provide:
“I step into the boxroom of your life, tiptoe round the shrouded furniture, shapeless islands on the exposed floor / Who lived in this room, and what kind of light fell through its window before the fixtures and fittings of time could bear no more?”
Hannah, Jackson, the case worker and the funeral director were the only attendees. It was six months later before they were called upon again. But they don’t mind the delay.
“It might seem like we’re not doing very many, but that to me is a good thing because I’m not sure that we want to be doing one every six weeks or so,” says Jackson.
When the pair attempted to expand the project to Glasgow, the council raised arguments about equity of access—claiming, according to Hannah: “If we let you do this as a free thing, then there may be people who actually are above the means-tested level for a free council burial who will have to spend money on this themselves. They might get a bit upset that sometimes we’re getting a poet in for nothing.”
A Glasgow Council spokeswoman said: “Each and every funeral carried out by the council is conducted with the upmost respect, dignity and recognition for the deceased.
“GCC’s funeral process remains fair and equitable for all citizens, regardless of the availability of funds.”
However, Hannah believes counter-arguments, whether about equity or environmental health or something else, are really about councils’ struggle to stay afloat: “If they even have the slightest suspicion that something’s going to cost them money or time, they just run a mile.”
“It didn’t cost us anything, it didn’t cost Dundee Council anything—not a penny. But Dundee Council is so stretched, and so concerned about finance and manpower, that out come these smokescreens about GDPR. These are mostly red herrings, but they’re effective red herrings that are forcing you down roads that just seem to close at dead ends.”
Dundee Council did not respond to a request for comment.
Hannah and Jackson see public health funerals as a way to involve the community—suggesting secrecy only undermines a council’s efforts.
“If you were a local authority—and you knew that this week, you had three people who were going to have lonely funerals—if you publicise those, there will be people in society who will make it their business to be there,” says Jackson.
“It’s the same reason that people join the Samaritans or join the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Somebody has to do it, and if you are suited to it psychologically and emotionally, then you would do it. You would find just ordinary people who would say, ‘Well, I’ll go to a funeral this week because no one else is.’”
When grief has no place to go
When councils fail to meet the needs of their communities, grief becomes all the more difficult to navigate. For families caught between the pain of not getting a loved one a dignified final goodbye, while also bearing the shame of having to rely on the council for financial support, the aftermath of “bad practice” public health funerals can be dark and painful.
“It has a terrible effect on people’s mental health and self-esteem,” Pastor Fleming says. “There’s something about not getting closure or feeling useless—a feeling that ’I can’t even do this for my loved one’.
“It doesn’t matter what anybody says, if you can’t give your mother, your father, your brother, your sister, or even your child a funeral… the feeling is that you should be able to do that. It should be a minimum requirement.”
This chance to say goodbye can be vital in the grieving process, and according to Martin, options like direct cremation can starve people of this cathartic final moment with their loved ones.
“You miss out on viewing the service, the eulogy, the ritual and the goodbye that people feel they want in that moment,” she says. “If you don’t even get the ashes back, you’re not getting the goodbye of going and doing it yourself.”
This becomes all the more important when the relationship between the deceased and their families was not necessarily a positive one. In these cases, the funeral can be a chance for closure—to draw a line under a traumatic relationship.
“I think it’s just so important because I’ve had people who still call me, and it changed things for them. Families heal, and people deal with things. It’s a couple of extra 100 quid for someone’s feeling of peace. It’s really quite important,” says Martin.
“With no service, they are missing out on a feeling of having their grief acknowledged as just as valid as anyone else who can stump up the cash.”
The state of play
Julie Dunk, who provides training for local authority officers, describes the overextension of council funds, seen across every sector of local government, as “a failure in government to help families”.
“They’re pushing the burden on local authorities. The Public Health (Control of Disease) Act wasn’t a social act. It gave local authorities a mechanism to stop bodies being a health hazard—it was never meant to diffuse social function and replace government support for those who can’t afford a funeral,” she says. “But that’s more and more what it seems to be becoming.”
And with little hope of the local authority sector improving any time soon, Lockwood believes further cuts are in the pipeline.
“I’ve got to reiterate this point: councils have got no money, they’re broke, they’re all broke. There’s no extra money to squeeze out the lemon,” he says.
“Councils are at that point now, and some councils are looking at every service and saying: is it statutory? No? Cut it.”
And in the United Kingdom, where the cost of living continues to rise, the dead will never take precedence.
“Politically, it’s really hard to engage the government in this talk,” says Dunk. “During the pandemic, death was on the agenda. As soon as the pandemic was over, they didn’t want to engage anymore.”
Death is just as much a part of life as birth, and as Martin sees it, if you live in a country where you’re born for free in a hospital, then death should not have a price tag. At the very least, your funeral should not drain your finances before you leave this world.
Now, campaigners to continue to call for better standardisation—for a law that demands more of its local authorities than that they simply bury or cremate someone. The QSA’s report spells out a 10-step plan, from standardising switchboard operator procedure to reviewing policies regarding attendance and the return of ashes.
“We need to standardise what’s on offer. People need reassurance that the state cares about them. We’re all vulnerable, aren’t we?” says Dunk.
“I would hate to think that if I died alone that somebody wouldn’t take care of me, or that there isn’t a structure in the law that means that I would be respected, that I wouldn’t just be a problem.
“What a privilege it is to be able to do the last decent thing that you can do for a person by giving them a decent send-off. You just need to mark that this person lived, that at some point they were loved, that they mattered to people. We can do better than just treating it as a problem of disposal.”
