On Budget day, having spent the last two years mulling over proposals to bring all providers of pre-paid funeral plans into the ambit of the Financial Conduct Authority, HM Treasury has finally decided to go ahead.

HM Government asked the public for views and information that might support the FCA's regulation of the cowboy-ridden pre-paid funeral plan market in June 2018. At the moment, funeral plan providers can seek registration with the Funeral Planning Authority, but this body lacks teeth.

Not so long ago, HNWs often studiously ignored the pre-planning of funereal finance, hoping to show the world that their estates could easily afford extravagant events of this kind without bothering to set money aside for them.

The government believes that anyone who regulates the sector should try to ensure that:

• all pre-paid funeral plan providers are subject to realistic standards of conduct;
• someone is overseeing providers’ prudential soundness to a hitherto-unprecedented degree; and
• consumers have access to appropriate dispute resolution mechanisms if things go wrong.

HNW individuals are spending more money than ever on family funerals. Hearses, horses, limousines, buses, helicopters, cashmere-lined coffins, rockets going into space, Viking longships being set alight and pushed out to sea - all are common. As Bloomberg has put it, HNWs are increasingly viewing funerals as the last opportunity they have to flaunt their great wealth.

"They’re choosing to be laid to rest in $60,000 gold-plated coffins and ferried by horse-drawn funeral carriages or Rolls-Royce hearses. Some are even flying friends and relatives to exotic locales for destination funerals.

"A cottage industry of advisors is in place to meet the demand and some wealth managers are encouraging clients to confront their own mortality and make advance plans — not only to ease the grief of those left behind, but also for tax purposes."

The newswire has quoted a wealth manager as saying that "businessmen and billionaires are often aggressively competitive in life and that doesn’t end when they think they’re going to die."