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Advice

What are the Current Funeral Guidelines in the UK?

• Published 24/05/2021

Monday 17th May marked another milestone in the United Kingdom's roadmap out of Coronavirus restrictions, with various rules being relaxed and a slight amount of normality beginning to resume.

One of the sectors which has seen an alteration in restrictions is funerals. But what are the changes? In this blog I'm going to detail the UK's current funeral guidelines.

Funeral Guidelines in the UK from 17th May

The UK Government's website sums up the new guidelines, saying: "From 17 May, the number of attendees at a funeral will be determined by how many people the venue can safely accommodate with social distancing measures in place, including anyone working. There will no longer be a maximum number of attendees defined in regulations."

As you can probably gather from that, there is no longer a maximum number of attendees to funerals set in UK law, meaning that, in theory, you can have as many people as you like at a funeral.

But of course, it's not as simple as that in practice. As the new guidelines state, numbers will still have to be determined based on how many people can maintain social distancing measures in the venue the funeral is taking place.

For most of the pandemic until this point, you could only have a set number of attendees at a funeral, so the size of the venue which held it wasn't much of an issue. With the new guidelines however, if you're in the process of planning a funeral service, it would be worth researching the size of venues, as well as contacting them and asking how many people they're able to accommodate.

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But what about commemorative events? In the past year, many have forgone a funeral and planned to have an event in the person's memory as restrictions began to be lifted. However, for these such events, the maximum number of people permitted to attend is 30.

It may be worth waiting until further restrictions are (hopefully) lifted on June 21st if you'd like to hold a commemorative event without any limits on who can attend. However, if you’re fine with a smaller, more intimate ceremony, then you now have much more freedom than you did even a month ago in this regard.

Thank you for taking the time to read today’s blog, I hope you found it interesting. For more blogs on a wide range of interesting subjects, please visit funeral-notices.co.uk/blog.