CPS to target assets of jailed Legacy funeral director Robert Bush

Until he moved to an address in Otley, West Yorkshire, as part of his bail conditions, Bush lived in an affluent part of the East Riding of Yorkshire.

He enjoyed motorcycle racing and was arrested at Heathrow Airport after a holiday in the United States.

Describing it as a “shocking” case, with “really serious breaches of trust”, Tams said more than 13,000 pages of prosecution evidence had been compiled.

Families had been misled by Bush since 2012, investigators found.

Besides the failure to cremate bodies placed in his care, it became apparent there were “much wider aspects” of Bush’s offending, said Tams.

“He was fraudulently trading in funeral plans when he wasn’t authorised to do so, and there was over 200 people that were affected by that.

“They thought that they were investing in their future funeral care, they thought that he [Bush] would have been investing that money with financial institutions. But, in fact, he had kept that money for his own purposes.”

Tams said the CPS’s priority throughout had been to ensure it built a “robust” case that showed the full extent of Bush’s offending “so that the families could get justice”.