CPS to target assets of jailed funeral director

A disgraced funeral director's bank accounts and assets have been frozen, as prosecutors seek to recover cash fleeced from his victims.

Robert Bush was jailed for 20 years at Hull Crown Court on Friday for 67 offences, including denying 30 people a decent and proper burial and giving families the ashes of strangers.

Bush, 48, who ran Legacy Independent Funeral Directors in Hull, stole up to £12,000 from charities and sold fake funeral plans.

Laura Tams KC, deputy chief crown prosecutor at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), said: "We will be looking at him, at the financial aspects of this case, to see if we can confiscate any of the proceeds of his crimes and try to compensate the families."

Sentencing Bush following a five-day hearing, Mr Justice Hilliard said it was clear that he "benefited very substantially" and "obviously lived very well".

Speaking exclusively to the BBC, Tams said it "was not a case of somebody that had recently fallen on hard times".

She added: "I think the scale of the offending, the length of time it had gone on for, showed that really this had become something of his business model."

Bush's litany of crimes included leaving the remains of a stillborn baby on the floor for two years and giving the grieving parents the wrong ashes, the court heard.

In court, barrister Richard Wright KC said his client, who admitted the charges, was a man of previous good character who had "lost his good name and his livelihood".

Wright said "greed, incompetence and an inability to keep up with his own failings" had all played a part in his crimes.

In police interviews, Bush – whose funeral parlour was found in a state of chaos when officers raided it – told how debts had accrued, leaving him unable to pay for cremations.

Yet in court, it emerged that Bush took £162,000 a year for himself and transferred an average of £52,000 a year to his wife.

Several thousand pounds a year were spent on holidays, flights and hotels, records show.

Between 2017 and 2024, the total amount of money paid into both Legacy and Bush's personal accounts was more than £3.5m.

Until he moved to an address in Otley, West Yorkshire, as part of his bail conditions, Bush lived in an affluent part of the East Riding of Yorkshire.

He enjoyed motorcycle racing and was arrested at Heathrow Airport after a holiday in the United States.

Describing it as a "shocking" case, with "really serious breaches of trust", Tams said more than 13,000 pages of prosecution evidence had been compiled.

Families had been misled by Bush since 2012, investigators found.

Besides the failure to cremate bodies placed in his care, it became apparent there were "much wider aspects" of Bush's offending, said Tams.

"He was fraudulently trading in funeral plans when he wasn't authorised to do so, and there was over 200 people that were affected by that.

"They thought that they were investing in their future funeral care, they thought that he [Bush] would have been investing that money with financial institutions. But, in fact, he had kept that money for his own purposes."

Tams said the CPS's priority throughout had been to ensure it built a "robust" case that showed the full extent of Bush's offending "so that the families could get justice".

A total of 12 charities had lost money, the court heard.

"Families had left donations that they wanted to go to charitable causes on behalf of their loved ones," said Tams. "And on 12 occasions that we know of, that money was not received by the charities."

Prosecutors were unable to say exactly how much money Bush had stolen from charity collection boxes over a period of six years and six months, but the court was told they put the figure at between £5,540 and £12,000.

Some of the families involved in the case have called for regulation of the funeral industry.

Tams said the case had "uncovered really serious and fundamental flaws" in the industry.

"The fact that his business had been able to run in this way for so many years and left unidentified is deeply troubling," she said.

Watch the story of Robert Bush and Legacy funeral directors in a new programme on BBC iPlayer.

If you have been affected by issues surrounding bereavement, information is available via BBC Action Line, including contact details of organisations that can help.