R v Bush: charging and sentencing without a clear framework

On 31 July 2026, Hilliard J sentenced Robert Bush, the former Hull funeral director, to 20 years' imprisonment. In March 2024, police investigating Legacy Independent Funeral Directors found 35 unburied bodies and more than 100 sets of ashes at the premises.

Bush pleaded guilty, in two tranches, to 67 counts: 30 of preventing a lawful and decent burial, for each body recovered; 30 matching counts of fraud by false representation, one for each of those families; a rolled-up fraud count covering some 57 families given the wrong ashes or none at all; four counts concerning foetal ashes; and one count each of fraudulent trading in funeral plans and theft of charitable donations. The burial counts carried the lead term of 15 years (19 years before credit), with the fraud counts relating to ashes concurrent. Four years for fraudulent trading and 12 months for theft ran consecutively. He was also disqualified as a director for 14 years.

Christopher Paxton KC and Steven Ball of Red Lion Chambers prosecuted, instructed by the CPS Serious Economic, Organised Crime and International Directorate. The case was exceptional in scale. In part, it was also novel in law as Bush's offending did not easily fit with the offences available to prosecute it. The indictment had to be built from a common law offence concerned with the concealment of bodies and fraud legislation focused on financial loss.

Sentencing without a guideline

Preventing a lawful and decent burial is a common law offence with no sentencing guidelines nor maximum penalty. In R v Russell [2023] EWCA Crim 1080, the Court of Appeal reviewed 11 authorities and laid out general guidance, suggesting a starting point of about three years where a body has been deliberately concealed and the police misled, but there was no intention to obstruct an investigation into the death.

This case did not fall within the highest Russell category, reserved for concealment intended to obstruct the investigation of an unnatural death (five to six years). There was no suggestion that any of the deceased died of unnatural causes, and Bush was not alleged to have prevented any investigation into the cause of death. But Russell's categories turned largely on why a body was hidden and the obstruction of an investigation into a death. Bush's case inverted that paradigm. The concealment hid not a death but the failure to provide a service, and the person responsible was the professional the families had trusted with their loved ones.

Here the court was concerned not with a single act of concealment but with 30 separate counts, each representing a distinct family's grief and loss of the ability to obtain the remains of their relatives with dignity and in accordance with their wishes. The cumulative gravity of the 30 counts far exceeded what any single starting point within Russell could adequately reflect.

The sentence followed the harm. The 15-year lead term on the burial counts was five times the Russell starting point for deliberate concealment, a gap that measured how far outside the existing framework this case sat. It reflected the treatment of the dead and the deception of their families, and the corresponding fraud counts ran concurrently. The other financial offending, a different kind of wrong against largely different victims, was then added consecutively.