Additional information

Flax Bourton Public and Forensic Mortuary provides mortuary and autopsy services for the Senior Coroner for Avon. The Avon Coroner works across the four council areas of Bristol, South Gloucestershire, North Somerset, and Bath and North East Somerset. All four councils pay for the costs of the Avon Coroner, including running the mortuary, through local council taxation of residents. This is known as ‘public funding.’

The coroner investigates a person’s death if:

• the cause of death is not known
• the cause of death is possibly violent or unnatural
• the person died in prison, police custody or another type of state detention.

The coroner will establish who died, and when, where, and how they died. While the coroner investigates the death, the deceased person’s body rests at Flax Bourton Mortuary in special cold facilities, to slow the decomposition of the body.

Once the coroner has finished her investigation, she releases the deceased person to the family’s appointed funeral director. The funeral director is then responsible for collecting the deceased person as quickly as possible and storing the deceased person until they are buried or cremated. 

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The amount of mortuary space needed to store deceased bodies is increasing for the following reasons:

• Population changes: the number of people living in the Avon area has increased by 10% since Flax Bourton mortuary was built in 2009. The number of people dying each year has increased by 13%
• The time between a person’s death and their cremation or burial is increasing. During this time, the deceased person must be stored. This trend is due to:
  • More families delaying a funeral to enable friends and relatives to attend
  • An increase in the number of ‘public heath funerals’. These are funerals provided by local authorities for deceased people whose relatives or friends cannot be found or are unable or unwilling to arrange a funeral. Deceased people who have a public health funeral stay longer in the mortuary whilst we try to find possible relatives and friends.
  • There are increasing numbers of ‘direct cremations’. These are ‘no frills’ funerals where the provider does not have a mortuary and relies on storing the deceased person in public sector mortuaries such as Flax Bourton Mortuary and NHS mortuaries.
• There is also a lack of capacity in some funeral directors’ own mortuaries, which leads them to leave deceased people they are responsible for in Flax Bourton and NHS mortuaries.

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