Just when you thought the bureaucratic nightmare of public healthcare couldn't get any worse, an NHS trust has managed to fail at the absolute basics of human civilization: keeping dead bodies cold. Inspectors from the Human Tissue Authority (HTA) paid a visit to the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust in March and found a literal horror show. Eight bodies were discovered in a state of "advanced deterioration" because staff apparently couldn't manage to move them into a freezer in time. The HTA concluded that the trust has "insufficient storage"—which is a polite way of saying they ran out of fridge space.

But the bureaucratic incompetence doesn't stop at letting bodies rot. The HTA inspectors also found that the genius staff at the mortuary weren't even checking identification wristbands when handing bodies over to funeral directors. Because the bodies were already heavily decomposed, they were shoved into hermetically sealed bags, meaning there was a very real chance of families receiving the wrong relative's remains. You had one job: store the bodies and make sure you give the right one back. Total fail.

This mortuary disaster is just the latest red flag for an institution that is already widely regarded as completely toxic. The Nottingham trust is currently the star of the NHS's largest-ever maternity service inquiry. A massive 400-page independent report dropped on Wednesday, led by senior midwife Donna Ockenden, and the findings are grim. Between 2012 and 2025, more than 500 mothers and babies either died or were severely harmed under this trust's care due to "systemic, deep-rooted" failures.

The entire mortuary scandal only came to light because one family refused to accept the official nonsense. Sarah and Jack Hawkins, whose daughter Harriet was stillborn at Nottingham City Hospital back in 2016, demanded to know why her tiny body had decomposed so badly in state custody that she had to be "triple-bagged" for her funeral. Ockenden’s report devoted 29 pages to the Hawkins family, calling their treatment a prime example of how the trust "cruelly" treated parents and babies.

Following the PR disaster, the trust's Chief Executive, Anthony May, went on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to do the classic corporate damage-control routine. When grilled about the total lack of care shown to the bodies, May did some public self-flagellation, saying, "I will take responsibility and accountability for that, because you’re absolutely right, that happened on my watch."