How Kingdom Funerals verifies prices and information

By Jakub Henderson · Last updated 9 May 2026 · Sources

Every figure on this site is checked twice on the same day, against two different sources. The detail of how matters — if a price on a card is wrong, the family that rings a funeral director on the basis of it has been misled. This page sets out the editorial method in plain terms so that anyone — a reader, a funeral director, an auditor — can read it and judge.

Two-source verification

Every firm price published on Kingdom Funerals comes from a two-pass review. The extractor pass reads the firm's own published Standardised Price List — the document the law requires every UK funeral director to publish — and records the three CMA-standardised products: Attended Funeral, Direct Cremation, and Unattended Burial. The verifier pass happens on the same day. It either re-fetches the same primary source independently, or cross-checks the figure against a second authoritative source where one exists.

Both passes log the source URL and the date the source itself was published. If the two passes return different numbers, the figure is flagged for resolution rather than published. Resolution is either a third source, a phone call to the firm to confirm the current figure, or the figure is dropped from the card with a note explaining why.

What counts as a primary source

A primary source for the purposes of this site is a document or page published by the firm itself, or a document filed by the firm under regulatory obligation. That means: the funeral director's own website carrying their own SPL; the SPL handed over the counter at the firm's premises in print; a Companies House filing where the firm is incorporated and prices are disclosed; or a CMA-registered SPL submission.

Aggregator review sites — Funeral Guide, Beyond, Yell, Cylex, comparison portals — are not primary sources, even where they reproduce a price. A price on an aggregator is one degree removed from the firm's own register; the aggregator's own update cycle is opaque. Kingdom uses aggregators only as a verifier-pass cross-check against the firm's own SPL, never as the source of truth.

What we flag and how

Every directory entry carries a state. Six are possible:

• verifiedDate. The date the figure last cleared a two-source check on Kingdom.
• sourceDate. The publication date written on the SPL itself by the firm.
• stale. A figure whose verifiedDate is more than 180 days ago. The card carries a softer ink colour and an inline note: "Last verified [date]. Confirm current price with the firm before deciding."
• no_public_pricing. The firm does not publish an SPL accessible to a reader without phoning. The card is listed without prices, with a note explaining the absence.
• BOT_BLOCKED. The firm's site blocks automated fetches. The figure is verified manually instead of automatically. The flag is internal-only.
• NON_COMPLIANT. Kingdom's own taxonomy for an SPL that exists but does not follow the CMA's standardised structure. The figure is recorded with a footnote.
• MATCH-with-anomaly. Both passes returned the same number, but a sanity check flagged the number as unusually high or low. Held for human review before publication.

Re-verification clock

Every published figure is re-verified at 90 days, regardless of whether the firm has announced a price change. After 90 days, the verifiedDate on the card renders in soft ink to signal age. After 180 days, the card carries the inline staleness note above and is queued for active re-fetch.

The Co-op Funeralcare branches are a known exception. Eight of the eleven Fife Co-op branches show prices dated April 2024 on the public mirror that Co-op publishes. Co-op refreshed Rosyth in April 2026 but has not refreshed the others. Kingdom prints what is published; the cards carry an explicit stale-data note rather than substituting a guessed-at figure.

What we cite

Where a fact on a help page rests on a primary source, the source is linked inline at the point the fact is stated. The list of primary sources Kingdom relies on, and which can be checked against any claim on any page:

• Competition and Markets Authority — Funerals Market Investigation Order 2021
• mygov.scot — Scottish Government public services
• NHS Inform Scotland
• Fife Council — bereavement services, registration, cemeteries, crematoria
• Social Security Scotland — Funeral Support Payment
• FCA register — pre-paid funeral plan providers
• Humanist Society Scotland
• legislation.gov.uk — the Acts of the Scottish and UK Parliaments referenced on each page
• Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service
• National Records of Scotland

What we are not

Jakub Henderson is a web developer based in Fife, not a funeral director, not a registered funeral celebrant, not a solicitor, not a financial adviser, and not a bereavement counsellor. Kingdom Funerals does not provide funeral advice, legal advice, financial advice, or grief support. What Kingdom does is publish the prices that funeral directors are required by law to keep, and signpost a reader to the primary sources for the system around those prices.

Where a reader needs a category of help Kingdom does not cover — emotional support, debt advice, legal advice on an estate — the help pages name the right service and link to its own primary contact route. Kingdom does not act as an intermediary.

Conflict of interest

The same operator who runs Kingdom Funerals also runs plain.funeral, a separate site that sells a single-page Standardised Price List website to funeral directors at a fixed monthly price. The two sites are kept editorially separate. No Plain customer receives preferential listing on Kingdom. The full disclosure is at /disclosure/.

Corrections

If a price on a card is wrong, a fact on a help page is wrong, a firm should be listed and isn't, or a firm should be removed, write to hello@kingdomfunerals.co.uk. Replies usually within two working days. Corrections to firm prices are made the same working day; corrections to help pages within a working week, with a visible last-updated date in the page footer.

Last updated 9 May 2026.