Aylesbury funeral director reassures customers family business has no links to Hull branch under police investigation

A funeral director in Aylesbury is reassuring customers that his business is in no way linked to another firm under police investigation in Hull.

James Burrett and his team at Legacy Funeral Services have been taking calls from concerned customers since police recovered bodies from a totally separate business 150 miles away.

Two callers swore down the phone at staff wrongly thinking they were speaking to people connected to the criminal investigation.

A finance company which assists families who may not be able to afford a funeral service, says one company even stopped working with the Aylesbury firm after wrongly assuming it was linked to the investigation in Humberside.

And although the company is now aware it made an error, James is having to apply to get reinstated on the regulator’s books.

James said: “The worrying thing is all people will do, the same as any of us when you’re searching for a service, is log onto Google type in what you’re searching for and in this situation if you type in Legacy Funerals into Google, unfortunately what pops up is all these horrible articles about what’s going on up north.

"When someone is grieving they’re not going to research that much are they? They are going to look at that and go ‘oh, avoid that company’.”

Dozens of residents have shared posts on the company’s Facebook page recognising the business is in no way linked to criminal investigation. Others have taken to social media to endorse the family business that has been operating in Aylesbury since 2019.

One said: “So sorry to hear this, especially from such a caring funeral service.” Another posted: “Legacy Funeral Services in Aylesbury are the most compassionate, professional funeral service.”

However, James remains concerned that these messages will not be seen by potential new customers. A name change has been considered, especially with so many factors remaining unknown about the ongoing police investigation, where 30 bodies were recovered by officers.

"It’s something we’re looking into,” James said. “The problem we’ve got with that is we are only a small business and in order to change the company name there is a huge cost involved. It’s not as simple as changing your shop sign is it? It’s the website, the marketing, it’s all the paperwork, and HMRC, the Government. We have to let everyone know if we change our name and the cost involved in that is huge.

"The other thing is we don’t really want to run away from anything. Because we are completely innocent. And we are doing things right, we’re regulated by the National Association of Funeral Directors, we have regular inspections. We actually requested another one for peace of mind for the public.

"It’s difficult to know what to do, if you changed your name, you run the risk of having people go ‘oh, they changed their name they must have had something to do with it’.”