Dignity Funeral Plan Refund

Snorkmaiden26 · 2 May at 11:24AM

Hi,

First time posting, I'm just looking for some advice since its my first time planning a funeral!

So, my Uncle passed away recently and when we managed to get hold of his details, it turned out that he had a funeral plan with Dignity Funeral Plans (transferred from Rest Assured when plans became FCA regulated).

That wasn't an issue, the Funeral Director was lovely. However, it turned out that his funeral plan was for just an unattended cremation, whereas he had communicated very clearly to various family members that he wanted an attended funeral (to the point where he had already chosen the music he wanted, the location, the celebrant, etc). On that basis, we went ahead with an attended funeral, and assumed initially that the funeral plan would cover the cremation and then we could just pay the extra for the rest of it.

Unfortunately, it turns out that is not how it works. We were told (by both the funeral director and a customer service person at Dignity) that we needed to cancel the funeral plan for a refund, and then pay for the whole funeral separately. Not ideal, since the funeral came to over £4,000, but we figured at least we were going to get a bit back for it.

However, we've now been told (after the funeral has taken place and been paid for) that we "might" receive a refund at some point in the future, but they don't know when or how much. I think this is because the original plan was with Rest Assured, and Dignity are trying to get money back from them as they took over the funerals. However, if we'd been told this up front, we could have gone ahead with the unattended funeral and then organised a separate service/wake to still include all of his wishes, and it would have saved about £2k. Is there anything that can be done about this? I don't want to focus on the money but it just doesn't seem fair that the money he set aside to pay for his funeral has just vanished without a trace?