Going above and beyond in bereavement services

Jacqueline Landy, Head of Bereavement Services at Lambeth Borough Council, details how her team clinched their first APSE Service Award.

At the APSE Annual Service Awards 2023, Lambeth Bereavement Service triumphed with our first nomination, and first win, for Best Service Team for a Cemetery and Crematorium Service.

We were delighted to be invited to this year’s dinner. Our Head of Service and Funeral Services Manager had the privilege of travelling to Belfast, where they had the opportunity to meet and learn from all the amazing council members driving their boroughs forward. It was a very humbling, and exciting surprise to find that we weren’t only nominated, but won in this category.

The foundation of our service is the hard work of our dedicated team, who have gone above and beyond to implement a range of innovative initiatives within the last few years despite working (as many others in the industry) through a pandemic.

Our innovation and project management streams are managed alongside the day-to-day running of our essential service. Our service is operated by a small team spread across five sites. Recent initiatives have been driven by a clear community-focused approach, doing as much as possible to address industry-wide issues impacting bereaved persons at all levels. Particularly, we have been working hard to address funeral poverty as well the industry’s broader impact on the environment.

Daily, our staff witness firsthand the effect of funeral poverty. Having absorbed our council’s Public Health Funerals in 2017, we noticed how many of the referrals we received were not due to a lack of family or friends willing to conduct the funeral, but due to a lack of accessible funds – families who have some money, but not enough to meet the quote of their local funeral director.

In response, in 2019 we introduced the Lambeth Simple Funeral. The first of its kind in London, this service bypassed the need for traditional funeral directors, and offered families an in-house, reduced-cost basic funeral service at almost £3,000 less than the average cremation in London. We can now offer dignity to families who can remain in control of their loved one’s arrangements at a reduced price.

To do this, our team have been working hard to integrate horizontally, undertaking rigorous cross-training, and navigating limited budget, equipment, and transportation. Team members who have previously never been in contact with the deceased learned to collect, encoffin, remove pacemakers and conduct services. At no point have we seen a lack of enthusiasm or commitment from any member of staff.

We are now unique in that most of our team are not only cremation and cemetery accredited but mortuary trained. This allows us to offer a funeral from beginning to end.

The operations team have been extremely proactive in making suggestions and finding the time in their schedules to implement them. In 2022 we were proud to have achieved double Gold under the ICCM charter. After this win, we are only more determined to continue striving for excellence in our day-to-day work and beyond.

Addressing harmful carbon emissions, we installed London’s first electric cremator at Lambeth Crematorium in 2022. This will effectively reduce carbon emissions by up to 90%, and nitric oxide emissions by 50%. Careful planning was required to reconfigure the existing chapel so that the new cremator could be installed and get the chapel open as soon as possible.

We closed for 3 months during this time and as we are fortunate enough to manage two sites, we were able to offer West Norwood as an alternative site and continue with burials as usual.

This has not been our only move towards carbon neutrality. We have also implemented a range of vehicle management changes to secure FORS Bronze for our fleet, utilising green deliveries, and switching from plastic ‘Cremfilm’ lining for our coffins to fibre sheets.

We would like to issue a huge thank you to our staff for their resilience and dedication during these changes. We are determined to continue onwards, working towards complete carbon neutrality, and looking to expand what we can offer with the Simple Funeral.

Thank you to the APSE for their recognition and for the wonderful visit to the Titanic Museum!