Caroline Dinenage MP: speeches

Speeches

• 9 Mar 2026 · Funeral Directors: Regulation · Hansard source

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  I am afraid that it will be a rather morbid debate this evening. We spend remarkably little time in our lives thinking about the practicalities of death, and it is probably part of human nature that we do not dwell too much on the inevitable future fate that awaits us. That means we put far too much implicit trust in those who take responsibility for our bodies, and in those of our loved ones when we die. We all assume that in death we will be treated with respect and care by professionals, but his evening I am afraid I will share some hard truths about the gruesome reality of death. I warn anyone watching that what I have to say will be graphic and distressing—there in no way around that. Last year, Gosport residents and funeral directors Richard Elkin and Hayley Bell were found to have kept 46 bodies entrusted to their care in a completely inappropriate environment with an unregulated temperature. Describing entering the place to see his mother, one of my constituents said, “the awful smell is something that will never leave me”. Concerns about what was going on behind the doors of Elkin and Bell funeral directors were first raised by local residents, and then by the senior coroner at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth. A body had been sent for a post-mortem that was “laying in pools of bodily fluids” and infested with maggots. The post-mortem also found that the deceased individual had suffered a spinal fracture after death. After a Gosport borough council environmental health investigation raised concerns but took no further action, a few months later, simply because bills had not been paid, bailiffs attended the property, where two bodies were discovered, putrefying, in a room with bloodstained floors, water dripping from the ceiling, and broken windows. One of them was an elderly gentleman who had been left for 36 days. His body was found in a badly decomposed condition. It is too much of a cliché to compare this to a horror movie, because this is real life, or real death. When the family of one of the deceased was contacted, they were surprised, because they were under the impression that their loved one had already been cremated. The company had certainly taken payment for it. As the Minister will know, it was completely legal for Elkin and Bell to keep dead bodies in a room like that. Elkin and Bell could only be brought to justice by some incredibly diligent work by Hampshire police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and John Price KC, using a variety of different offences including fraud, forgery and a piece of common law that dates back to Victorian times. The crime of preventing lawful and decent burial was dusted off from the days when it was used to convict grave robbers. That is instead of what should have been possible, which was sentencing the pair because they had wilfully neglected bodies in their care, and treated people’s loved ones as nothing more than money spinners. The case highlighted that the funeral sector is nothing better than a wild west. When this was first brought to my attention, I was incredulous and horrified to learn that there is no regulation of any kind governing the sector. In fact, the only law that governs the funeral industry is around the financial transparency of funeral plans, and that was put in place after a Competitions and Markets Authority investigation in 2021. There are simply no mandatory qualifications, no accreditation, no licensing, no designated working practices or formal inspection and, crucially, no law to fall back on when things go wrong.

• 6 Jan 2026 · BBC Charter Renewal · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Mrs Harris. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) on securing the debate. I cannot think of anyone more qualified to kick off this conversation. The Select Committee will almost certainly look closely at the charter review, but today I will pull out a couple of topics for discussion. The Government have set out a number of lofty ambitions for the BBC in the Green Paper, but it is clear that it all hinges on a charter review that finds a long-term, sustainable funding future for the BBC. As we have seen, there are a number of challenges. The BBC provides so many different TV channels and radio stations, as we heard from my right hon. Friend. It does all that and more in an incredibly and more and more challenging commercial environment in which the licence fee looks increasingly like an anachronism. The extent to which the public no longer see live TV as the cornerstone of their viewing habits is reflected in the number of households not renewing their TV licence. We have heard that evasion is rising and is now at 12.5%. In real terms, the BBC lost over £1 billion of revenue in the decade from 2013. I was disappointed to read that certain options regarding the BBC’s size, scale and funding are not even on the table in the charter review. On the licence fee, the Green Paper says the Government “are not considering replacing it with alternative forms of public funding, such as a new tax on households”. I would be interested to hear why the Government are not even considering some options, some of which are employed across Europe to fund public service media. There are obvious challenges around some of the options that are under consideration. We have already heard about the issue of advertising. The BBC chair told my Committee that “we are absolutely clear that advertising and subscription is not the right approach. It goes back to universality and back to that old phrase, ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune.’ If subscribers are paying, they will call the tune on what we make. If it is advertising, it is advertisers.” Will the Minister say more about why the Government have chosen to explore some funding models and take others off the table at this vital stage? The BBC is the most trusted broadcaster both at home and abroad, but there is no doubt that, as our national broadcaster, we hold it to a higher standard. There has been a significant loss of confidence in the BBC over recent years. The Reuters Institute suggests that between 2018 and 2025, the proportion of people in the UK who trusted “most news most of the time” fell by 7%, but that over the same period trust in BBC news fell by 15%. We should therefore welcome the Green Paper’s commitment to discuss the provision of trusted news. Finally, the Government said they want to consider how to uphold the BBC’s independence, which includes its being transparent when it gets things wrong, how it changes its services, how it is governed and what its board looks like. There are fundamental questions for the Green Paper to address: what is the Government’s future vision for the BBC? What role should a public service broadcaster play in the current age? How can we continue to ensure that our national broadcaster remains independent, trusted and valued in this increasingly unstable and divided world?