Farewill Funerals: direct cremations terms and conditions

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Please read these terms carefully before buying a funeral with us, to make sure it’s the right choice for you. If you’re unsure or have any questions about our service, please contact us.

These terms and the funeral
How to contact us
How we’ll contact you
Who can buy a funeral
What’s included
What’s not included
Price and payment
Your responsibilities in ordering and using our service
Our liability
How you can cancel
How we can cancel
Insurance
To make a complaint, get in touch with us

1. These terms and the funeral

We’re Farewill Funerals, registered in England and Wales at address 27 Downham Road, N1 5AA under company number 09701947. These legal terms are between you and Farewill Funerals, and the laws of England and Wales apply.

If we cannot resolve a dispute using our complaints procedure, or by mediation, then the courts of England and Wales will settle it.

We may change our terms and services, or stop providing our services, to reflect changes in law or regulation, or to make minor adjustments or improvements. If we do, we’ll let you know using the contact information you give us. And if you spot something that does not look right, please get in touch.

2. How to contact us

If you need to talk to us about anything, you can:

Email us at [email protected]
Phone us on 020 8138 0315
Send a letter to 1st Floor, Farewill, 27 Downham Road, N1 5AA, UK

All our emails are from individuals or the team they’re in, followed by the domain @farewill.com. But please be wary of any spam emails claiming to be from us, and if you’re not sure, contact us using the details above.

3. How we’ll contact you

We’ll contact you in English using email, phone or post to your home address. If any of your details change, please let us know as soon as possible.

4. Who can buy a funeral

You must:

Be 18 or over
Have the legal authority to arrange the funeral of the person who’s died
Be responsible for paying for the funeral
Not be aware of any disagreement about the funeral, like a family disagreement about the type of funeral you’re arranging

If you’ve applied, or are going to apply, for a DWP funeral payment or any other financial help to pay for the funeral, you’re still responsible for paying us in full.

When choosing Farewill funerals, you need to complete all the paperwork which we send to you. Unless it’s for an urgent collection, returning this paperwork means you agree to these terms and our privacy policy, a contract is formed between you and us and you give us authority to start work on the funeral.

If you require an urgent collection (for example out of hours), we will accept authority to start work on the funeral when you tell us to on the phone. By telling us to start work on the funeral, you agree to these terms and our privacy policy and a contract is formed between you and us.

5. What’s included

Here’s our service in full.

Bringing your loved one into our care and looking after them at a chapel of rest
A direct cremation (without a service) anywhere in England, Wales and Scotland
A coffin and urn
Handling all the paperwork
Guidance and ideas for scattering ashes or planning a memorial service
Ashes available for collection by you at the crematorium

We suggest you remove any jewellery or valuables from the person who’s died before we bring them into our care, to avoid losing or damaging them. We cannot accept responsibility or liability for keeping them safe.

6. What’s not included

Interment (putting cremation ashes in a permanent resting place that people can visit)
A newspaper notice to let people know someone’s died
A memorial

There may also be fees for:

Transporting your body if you die outside of England, Wales or Scotland
A doctor to confirm the cause of death (if there’s no post-mortem)
Removing a medical device
Hand-delivery of your loved one’s ashes
Urgent collection (if they die at home or in a care home and we need to bring them into our care more quickly)
Bariatric support (if they’re particularly tall or over 20 stone, so we need more people or equipment to bring them into our care)
The delivery of ashes to an address outside of England, Wales and Scotland

If we cannot help you arrange a funeral, we’ll let you know and will not charge you. This might be because:

Of limits on our resources which we could not plan for
We found an error in the price or description of the funeral
We cannot meet a deadline you’ve asked for

We work with crematoriums across the country, so booking dates and times are often outside of our control. If we find out about changes to the funeral, we’ll contact you as soon as possible to let you know about alternative arrangements.

If something is not available at the time of the funeral, like your choice of urn, you agree for us to provide a reasonable alternative. We’ll always do our best to help organise the funeral you want, but we cannot guarantee any specific items.

7. Price and payment

The price you pay for the funeral is the price that is communicated to you when you make your order, except for additional fees for extra things that you chose. We’ll let you know how much these are in advance.

Where there is a dispute or delay which is outside of our control (for example a dispute about the funeral organisation or type of funeral) that causes us to have to store your loved one for longer than is usual, we’ll charge you a daily fee for this storage. We’ll let you know how much this is in advance.

8. Your responsibilities in ordering and using our service

If you require any of the services detailed above in ‘What’s not included?’, our service is unlikely to be right for you. We’re not liable or responsible if you proceed with our service where it is not fit for your own purposes.

You must provide us with accurate and true details about who you are, including that you have authority to arrange the funeral. You agree not to mislead us or misrepresent who you are.

9. Our liability

We're liable or responsible for any foreseeable loss or damage we cause you if we fail to comply with these terms - by breaking this contract or not using reasonable care and skill. Foreseeable means it's obvious it'll happen or, if at the time we made the contract, we both knew it might happen.

We're not liable or responsible for any loss or damage that's not foreseeable, for any loss or damage (direct or indirect) caused by something beyond our reasonable control, or if something was unavoidable despite us using reasonable care and skill to avoid it. So you won’t be able to claim against us if your losses resulted from circumstances that we couldn’t or shouldn’t have been expected to know about.

This includes:

You gave us information which was inaccurate
You acted fraudulently
Lost or damaged jewellery or valuables
You used our service in breach of these terms
Any delays or failure in performance under these terms resulting from acts beyond our control, such as a flood, war, emergency, electricity failure and pandemic

We do not exclude or limit in any way our liability to you, where it would be unlawful to do so. This includes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraudulent misrepresentation, or any other liability that cannot be excluded or limited by applicable law.

If we are held liable to you for any loss or damage arising from a breach of these terms and conditions and/or negligence, such liability shall in all cases be limited in aggregate to the payment of an amount not exceeding the amount you paid for the service, including costs and expenses.

10. How you can cancel

To cancel, email [email protected] or call 020 3318 8647.

The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation & Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 gives you the right to change your mind or cancel your order within a cooling-off period of 14 days, but you waive this cooling-off period when you return the paperwork we send you and we’ve started work on the funeral, or in the case of an urgent collection you have told us to start work on the funeral.

You will get a full refund if you cancel before a contract is formed between you and us, which is when you complete and return relevant paperwork to us, or in the case or urgent collection, when you tell us to start work on the funeral.

We start arranging the funeral after a contract is formed between you and us, so if you cancel after that, we may charge a cancellation fee.

Depending on the cancellation reason, you might be asked to make arrangements with another provider, and/or pay a reasonable amount for us to transfer the funeral arrangements to them. We’re not liable for anything they do, unless we acted negligently or missed something in appointing them for you.

11. How we can cancel

We reserve the right to withdraw or amend the service for a material reason (something significant that impacts the service). Where we can, we’ll aim to let you know the reasons why in advance.

We may cancel or suspend our service if we believe you’ve:

broken the terms of this agreement
put us in a position where we might break the law
broken the law or attempted to break the law
given us false or inaccurate information at any time
been abusive to anyone at Farewill
told us information which means in our reasonable opinion that our service is not right for you

We may also cancel the service if:

You don't, within a reasonable time of us asking for it, provide us with information, cooperation or access that we need to provide the service
There is a dispute or delay that makes the funeral impossible (for example in the organisation of the funeral)

If we cancel your access to the service, we’ll refund you any money that you’ve paid to us.

There may also be times where our services are delayed or we cannot provide services to you because of an event outside our control. If that happens, we’ll contact you as soon as possible to let you know and we’ll take reasonable steps to minimise any effects of the delay.

12. Insurance

We have professional indemnity insurance in place. Please get in touch with us if you’d like further information on our insurance levels.

13. To make a complaint, get in touch with us

We have a complaints policy which we can share with you on request.

To complain, email us at [email protected]

We’ll let you know as soon as we receive your complaint and outline the next steps. Your complaint will be handled by a dedicated member of our team.

Within 3 working days, they will contact you, introduce themselves and explain what we are doing to resolve your complaint. If we need to look into things further, they will respond to your complaint no longer than 8 weeks from our first acknowledgment of your complaint.