Privacy Policy

Who we are

We are the Funeral Partners Group (“us“, “we“, “our”) and we provide funeral services throughout our network of quality funeral homes which exist in the United Kingdom.

Our funeral homes in Great Britain typically belong to Funeral Partners Limited, whose company number is 06276941. If you are using our services in Northern Ireland, your funeral home will belong to Funeral Services Northern Ireland Limited, whose company number is 03983186. Both companies have their registered office address at 80 Mount Street Nottingham NG1 6HH.

For the purposes of applicable Data Protection and Privacy Laws, we are considered the “Data Controller” in respect of the Personal Data that we collect, use and manage in accordance with this Privacy Policy (“Policy”).

If you arrive at this page via the website of one of our partner funeral homes, then we are the Data Controller and we will collect, use and manage the Personal Data that the partner funeral home collects on our behalf in accordance with this Policy.

This Policy concerns itself primarily with explaining the Personal Data processing which is associated with the provision of funeral services to bereaved families at the time of need.

We also operate a funeral planning business, trading as Choice Funeral Plans. Choice Funeral Plans are provided by Alternative Planning Company Limited, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority with firm reference number 965282. For the privacy practices associated with our funeral planning business, please see https://choiceplan.co.uk/privacy-policy/

Protecting your rights and interests

Personal Data is information which relates to an identified or identifiable living individual. Protecting your data, and operating in line with the UK’s data protection standards, is very important to us.

This Policy explains what Personal Data we collect, how we may use and manage it and the rights you have in relation to your Personal Data. Before you or anyone else provides us with your Personal Data or browses our website, please read through this Policy in full, and make sure that you are comfortable with our privacy practices. Please do speak to us if you have any questions. We may be able to tailor our privacy practices to you if you have any specific concerns.

Our website may contain links to other organisations or other service provider websites. These third party sites are not subject to this Policy and we recommend that you check the privacy and security policies of each website that you visit. We are only responsible for the privacy and security of the data that we collect and we have no control over the actions of these third parties sites in relation to your data.

Please refer to the Glossary section at the end of this Policy for an explanation of the important terms in this Policy.

The Personal Data we collect

References in this policy to “you” or “your” are references to individuals whose Personal Data we may collect and process. We will collect and process your Personal Data in different ways, which will depend upon the relationship we have with you, and how we obtained your Personal Data and how you interact with the products and services we offer.

We collect Personal Data from a range of individuals in the context of our business activities, such as:

  • Customers (people who are interested in purchasing, or who do purchase, our funeral-related services);
  • suppliers, contractors, and other business contacts;
  • users of our websites;
  • individuals who contact us by any means;
  • our employees and those who are working with us on our behalf;
  • our job applicants.

How we collect your Personal Data

We obtain Personal Data when you knowingly and voluntarily disclose this to us, both in an online and offline context. We collect Personal Data when you:

  • visit our website and / or complete one of our web forms (for example, to contact us);
  • contact our funeral homes (for example, to arrange a funeral, to arrange memorial masonry with us, to engage with us about a funeral pre-payment plan, including to redeem a funeral pre-payment plan);
  • contact a support office or request information from us in any other way;
  • visit one of our premises;
  • make an enquiry to us;
  • communicate with us via social networking websites, third party apps or similar technologies;
  • visit one of our trade displays at an exhibition or local community event;
  • participate in competitions ran by us, for example, prize draws;
  • provide us with feedback as part of our services (for example, by responding to feedback requests or taking part in market research, or in the event you make a complaint about our services).

 

Where you provide us with Personal Data about someone other than yourself (for example, a next of kin or family member on whose behalf you are arranging a funeral), you must obtain their freely given, informed consent before doing so. You must also bring this Policy to their attention before you provide their Personal Data to us. If the person other than yourself withdraws their consent, you (or the other person) must contact us, at the earliest opportunity, to inform us of this fact.

When you make contact with us by telephone, we may record the call. Call recordings are beneficial for compliance, quality assurance and training purposes, and any call recording may be used if a complaint is raised. Call recordings will be retained in line with our Retention Policy.

What Personal Data we collect

We may collect a range of Personal Data from you, such as your name, gender, email address, home address and other contact details including phone and/or mobile phone details, details of your employment or business and other interests, communications with you (including notes from arrangement meetings) and financial and payment information. We may also collect Personal Data that may reveal race or ethnic origin, religious or philosophical beliefs, but only where you choose to give this to us and where this information you deem is necessary to give to us, in order to provide our services to you.

The purposes for which we process your Personal Data

We process your Personal Data for the following purposes:

  • to contact you, in return, when you contact us. For example, if we miss a call from you;
  • to get in touch with you when you provide us with personal information online as part of a purchase process, in order to provide you with any support you may need and to facilitate any purchase
  • to provide you with information, products and services enquired about or ordered by you (for example, funeral or masonry arrangements and/or dealing with associated requests);
  • to provide you with information relating to products and services which may be of interest to you;
  • to fulfil our obligations associated with any funeral plan where one of our funeral homes may be the nominated funeral director listed in the funeral plan;
  • to notify you of any changes to the services we are providing you;
  • to inform you of our community work or to provide you with information in relation to similar goods and services that may be of interest to you, where we have the appropriate permissions to do so. These could include local Christmas/memorial services, other community events that we may arrange, or relevant products such as memorial masonry products, or funeral plans;
  • to support us with market research, where we have the appropriate permissions to do so;
  • to communicate with you and third-party contacts;
  • to manage and build community relations;
  • to administer our websites and help improve our products and services;
  • to send you client satisfaction surveys in order to receive feedback on the services we provide to you;
  • to understand the success of our advertising, networking and different methods of contact with us;
  • to carry out analytics in relation to the use of our websites;
  • to comply with applicable laws and regulations;
  • other business-related purposes, including negotiating, concluding and performing contracts, managing accounts and records, supporting corporate social responsibility activities, legal, regulatory and internal investigations and debt administration.
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The legal basis for Funeral Partners processing your Personal Data

In order to comply with applicable data privacy laws, we are required to set out the legal basis for the processing of your Personal Data. In accordance with the purposes for which we collect and use your Personal Data, as set out above, the legal basis for our processing of your Personal Data will typically be one of the following:

  • the performance of a contract that we have in place with you or other individuals;
  • our legitimate business interests;
  • compliance with our legal or regulatory obligations; or
  • your consent.

Who we share your Personal Data with

Internal Colleagues

We may share your Personal Data with people within the company and our Group who have a “need to know” that data for business or legal reasons, for example, in order to carry out an administrative function such as processing an invoice, or to direct a query that you have submitted to the relevant provider within our network.

Outside Funeral Partners

We may disclose your Personal Data to third parties including suppliers, funeral plan providers who administer and support pre-need funeral plans, IT service providers and third parties engaged by Funeral Partners for the purpose of providing services requested by you, for example, out of hours contact centres, ministers, civil celebrants, florists, online memorial providers, crematoria, burial service providers, providers who assist us in generating reviews of our products and services, to protect any intellectual property rights in any materials displayed on or otherwise available from Funeral Partners’ websites, for the purposes of seeking legal or other professional advice, to respond to a legal request or comply with a legal obligation (for example, as received by the police, for the prevention and detection of crime) or to comply with any other legal obligation, and to enforce Funeral Partners’ websites Terms and Conditions of Use.

Providers who support us in generating reviews

We may provide certain Personal Data to our online software survey provider Qualtrics in order to send you our client satisfaction survey after you have arranged a funeral. Qualtrics only processes data to the extent necessary to provide the software and review services, and it does not disclose any Data to third parties. Qualtrics are contractually bound to safeguard all Data. If you choose to complete the survey your responses will only be shared with Funeral Partners in order to improve our services. However, in the survey, you may be asked if you are willing to share your review on our social pages and online. If you choose to submit such information to us, the information that you submit will be available generally to the public. Information that you provide in these areas may be read, collected, and used by others who access them.  On the survey, and as part of wider requests for feedback, you may also have an option to post a review to our Google My Business page from your Google account, which will be available generally to the public. Information that you provide in these areas may be read, collected, and used by others who access them.

MuchLoved

In addition, you may choose to provide your Personal Data to the independent Online Tribute Charity, MuchLoved. MuchLoved allow you to create an online notice about the funeral, as well as create an online tribute for your loved one. The MuchLoved platform also allows you and others to make donations to a charity partner via their site. These additional services provided by MuchLoved are optional and, if you choose to take advantage of these services, MuchLoved’s privacy policies will apply to any data you provide.

Please be aware that your data will be processed in accordance with MuchLoved’s own privacy practices, and the information you provide to MuchLoved may be visible on MuchLoved and other review platforms which may link to the MuchLoved database.

You can view MuchLoved’s privacy practices here https://www.muchloved.com/gateway/privacy-policy/.

 

Funeral Plans

In the event that a funeral plan is purchased, certain Personal data may be provided to us by the funeral plan provider. This will happen if we are the nominated funeral director listed in the funeral plan. You should therefore familiarise yourself with the privacy practices of your funeral plan provider, prior to providing any Personal Data to the funeral plan provider.

When we administer and provide funeral services associated with funeral plans, we and your funeral plan provider may be Joint Controllers of your Personal Data. Accordingly, we and your funeral plan provider may be both required to share and process your data amongst each other, in order to provide the services stipulated in the plan, and in order to administer and manage payments for products or services which may or may not be listed in the funeral plan.

Data Cleansing Providers

When you provide us with your personal data, we may use a third party data cleansing service on an ongoing basis in order to ensure your personal data is up-to-date. For example, if you move house, we may be informed of your new address by the third party service. We do not sell your data to the third party. We simply use the service to ensure we have accurate records for our communications with you, especially when we may correspond with you some years after the funeral.

This may happen, for example, when we communicate marketing messages to you. In such a case, we will communicate with you only when we have the relevant permissions to do so, and we will be communicating with you to inform you of relevant products and services (such as to invite you to remembrance services, or to inform you of our funeral plan offerings).

These communications may take place a number of years after having initially obtained your data, and it is therefore important that we screen your data so we can accurately contact you. You can opt out of receiving marketing messages from us any time, please contact us to do so at any point.

New Businesses and Insolvency Practitioners

We may disclose your Personal Data to third parties in the event that we sell, buy, liquidate or merge any business or assets, including to the prospective seller or buyer or liquidator of such business or assets. If a change happens to our business, the new owners may, or may not, use your Personal Data in the same way as set out in this privacy notice and updated privacy practices may apply.

Online

You may decide to share comments, postings, testimonials, or other information on third party sites (such as apps and websites) which are in some way linked to us, for example, if we have a corporate presence on these sites. If you choose to submit information to these sites, the information that you submit may be available generally to the public. Information that you provide may be read, collected, and used by others who access them and control them and you should look at the privacy practices associated with these sites before you provide your data.

Other

We may share non-Personal Data with other third parties that are not described above. When we do so we may aggregate or de-identify the information so that a third party would not be likely to link data to you, your computer, or your device. Aggregation means that we combine the non-Personal Data of numerous people together so that the data does not relate to any one person. De-identify means that we attempt to remove or change certain pieces of information that might be used to link data to a particular person.

Finally, we work with partners and use service providers based around the world. As a result, your Personal Data may be processed in countries outside of the UK and European Economic Area (“EEA”). If we transfer Personal Data outside the UK or EEA we will, as required by applicable law, ensure that your data protection rights are adequately protected by appropriate safeguards. Please contact us if you would like more information about these safeguards.

Data associated with deceased persons

Whilst data associated with deceased persons is not covered by UK data protection law, we nevertheless take appropriate steps to safeguard deceased data in our care. We also work closely with third parties to share deceased people’s data, in order to prevent such things as identity fraud, following a deceased person’s death.

Recruitment

When you apply for a job via our websites or otherwise, we will collect additional more specific Personal Data about you, such as your qualifications, career history, third party references and interview notes. We may also ask you for other information, for example your interests and the types of jobs you are interested in. Any Personal Data you provide to us in relation to a job vacancy will be processed in accordance with our Recruitment Privacy Notice which can be viewed here funeralpartners.co.uk/privacy-policy/recruitment.

Security

We take all reasonable technical and organisational security measures to protect Personal Data from accidental or unlawful destruction, accidental loss and unauthorised access, destruction, misuse, modification or disclosure. In addition, we limit access to your Personal Data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your Personal Data on our instructions.

If you are concerned about any electronic communication (such as email) you have received from us, you should raise this to us at servicesupport@funeralpartners.co.uk. You should not open any attachments or respond to the communication until such time as we have been able to investigate your concern. Once we have completed our investigation, we will contact you to discuss any action that may or may not be required.

Records retention

Your Personal Data is not kept for longer than is necessary for the purposes for which it is collected. This means that data and records (including Personal Data) are destroyed or erased from our systems when no longer required. The amount of time that records are kept for varies depending upon the type of Personal Data they contain.

There may be occasions where we hold your data for longer than our typical retention period. This may be because you might bring a claim against us, or have brought a complaint or a claim against us, or because there is a wider legal or regulatory obligation to do so.

You have a number of rights in respect of your Personal Data:

  • The right to be informed about the processing of your data (typically, we do this through this Privacy Policy)
  • The right to have your personal data corrected if it’s inaccurate and to have incomplete personal data completed
  • The right to object to the processing of your data
  • The right to restrict processing of your data
  • The right to have your personal data erased (the ‘right to be forgotten’)
  • The right to request access to your data
  • The right to move, copy or transfer personal data (‘data portability’)
  • The right for us to manually review any of our automated decision making procedure, including profiling

 

If you wish to exercise any rights associated with your data, please submit your request to the Data Protection Compliance Officer who can be contacted via email at data.protection@funeralpartners.co.uk or call 01803 298 243.

We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month from receipt of the request. Occasionally, it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. If this is the case, we will notify you and keep you updated.

Rights associated with your data are not absolute rights and certain limitations may apply. We will work with you to understand any concerns you may have, and to explain what we can do to support you.

If you are receiving certain optional communications from us (such as marketing), whether by email, telephone or post, you can “object” or “opt-out” or “withdraw” your consent to receiving such communications by responding to us either by replying to the correspondence that you have received or by contacting us.

Questions and complaints

If you have a concern or complaint about how we have used your Personal Data, as a first step, you should raise this in writing with us by contacting us at the following address:

The Data Protection Compliance Officer
Kingsway House
123-125 Goldsworth Road
Woking
Surrey
GU21 6LR

Alternatively, you can contact the Data Protection Compliance Officer via email at data.protection@funeralpartners.co.uk or call 01803 298 243.

If you are not satisfied with the handling of your concern or complaint, you can escalate this to your national Data Protection Authority. In the United Kingdom, this is the Information Commissioner’s Office https://ico.org.uk/

Changes to this Policy

We reserve the right to modify or amend this Policy at any time by posting the revised Policy on our websites. It is your responsibility to review the Policy every time you submit information to us or purchase a service.

Access

A hard copy of this Privacy Policy can be obtained by writing to:

The Data Protection Compliance Officer
Kingsway House
123-125 Goldsworth Road
Woking
Surrey
GU21 6LR

Alternatively, please email data.protection@funeralpartners.co.uk in order to request a written copy or call 01803 298 243.

Cookies

What are cookies

Our websites use cookies. A “cookie” is a small file of letters and numbers that is sent to your computer by a website and automatically saved on your computer by your web browser (for example, “Chrome”).  Each time you request a page from the website, your web browser sends this cookie back to the website server.

Google Analytics

The cookies we use are “analytical cookies” sent by Google Analytics.

They allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors per page and to recognise and track which parts of our websites you visit when you are using our websites.  This helps us to improve the way our website works, for example by making sure visitors are finding what they need easily.

We may also use the information collected from our use of cookies to estimate our audience size, analyse trends and general usage patterns of our websites, optimise our websites, and for other research and marketing purposes. This is statistical information and does not identify any individual.

The specific elements of Google Analytics 4 which we use are as follows:

  • Google Signals – if you are signed in to your Google account (and you have turned on “ads personalisation”) then this service allows us to understand how you have interacted with our website across different sites and applications across the different devices which you may use to access our websites. We may obtain your IP address when you interact with our website, such as when you buy a plan, fill in a contact form or request a brochure.
  • Granular Location & Device Data – if you have enabled granular location-and-device data on your device, then this allows us to understand where you are when you are accessing our websites, along with understanding such things as the browser and device you are using so that we can ensure our pages are optimised for the customers who use them
  • Personalised ads – if you have enabled personalised ads in your Google account, we may use this feature to promote relevant products/services to you on Google or other sites which partner with Google

More information about Google Analytics is available here, including opt-outs.

You can find more details in our policy which specifically related to our use of cookies.

Social media features

Our websites may include social media features, such as sharing or following buttons. These features may collect your IP address, which page you are visiting on our sites, and may set a cookie to enable the feature to function properly.

Social media features are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our websites. This Policy does not apply to these features. Your interactions with these features are governed by the privacy practices and other policies of the companies providing them.

Other features

We may also record the precise interactions which certain visitors have with our website. This is called “session recording” (and it is anonymised and never attributed to an individual). This enables us to learn how visitors to our site navigate our webpages in real time.

At times, we may also use what is known as A/B Testing. This shows different content at different times to different users of our website, so we can in turn determine which performs better. A/B testing does not identify you as an individual, but it means you may see different content from other visitors on our websites.

We may also choose to enable website surveys, which may ask you to provide your feedback about our websites and this may be stored alongside your session recording.

Your feedback

We think it is very important to hear what you have to say about our privacy practices. If you have any feedback about this Policy, please e-mail us at data.protection@funeralpartners.co.uk.

Last Updated 02/05/2024

Glossary

Data Controller
A party that determines the purposes and means of data processing.

 

Data Protection and Privacy Laws
The UK General Data Protection Regulation, as per section 3 (10) (and as supplemented by section 205 (4)) of the Data Protection Act 2018, and the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003.

 

Data Protection Authority
The relevant supervisory authority with responsibility for privacy or data protection matters.

 

European Economic Area (EEA)
The EEA includes all European Union member states and Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.

 

Personal Data
Information which relates to an identified or identifiable individual (for example, data about employees, contractors, applicants, employees, suppliers, contractors, business contacts, customers/clients using our products and services and individuals who use our websites or service centres). It includes names, addresses, email addresses, job applications, user account information, and correspondence. Personal Data can also include web browsing information (for example, data associated with a particular cookie) and IP addresses, when such information can be linked to an individual.

 

Processing
Doing anything with Personal Data; this includes collecting it, storing it, accessing it, combining it with other data, sharing it with a third party, or deleting it.