When a family disagrees on a loved one’s funeral arrangements 

Losing a loved one is hard enough. It becomes harder still when the family cannot agree on how to lay them to rest, whether that is burial or cremation, repatriation, religious rites, or what happens to the ashes afterwards. 

No one owns a dead body. That is still the starting point in law, and it is why these disputes end up in court at all: when relatives cannot agree, there is no ownership right for a judge to hand to whoever has the strongest claim. A number of recent High Court decisions show an increasing number of these types of dispute, and each one shows how emotionally and legally complex they can become. 

Who is responsible for making decisions about a funeral? 

Where there is a Will, the executors usually decide. If there is no Will, that responsibility usually falls to whoever is entitled to administer the estate under the intestacy rules (such as, in order of priority, the deceased’s spouse or civil partner, their children, their parents, or their siblings, etc). Where two or more people sit at the same level of that order, both have an equal claim, and that is often exactly where a dispute begins, as the first case below shows. Either way, the deceased’s own wishes are highly relevant but are not generally legally binding in the same way as directions concerning estate administration, and that gap is exactly where these disputes take root. The court’s overriding concern, where it does have to get involved, is that the deceased is laid to rest respectfully, decently and without unnecessary delay. 

Recent High Court decisions on funeral arrangements 

• Read v Hoarean & Anor [2024] EWHC 3274 (Ch); later appealed as Hoarean v Read [2026] EWHC 763 (Ch) 

Theo Read died intestate at 18, leaving his separated parents equally entitled to arrange his funeral. They agreed he should be cremated. They could not agree on what should happen to his ashes afterwards, his father wanting them scattered, his mother wanting them divided. Chief Master Shuman granted the father limited letters of administration under section 116 of the Senior Courts Act 1981 and authorised the arrangements he proposed, including scattering Theo’s ashes on Dartmoor rather than dividing them between the parents.. The mother appealed. She lost, over a year later, a reminder of how long these disputes can drag on even after a judge has already ruled. 

• Patel v Patel [2025] EWHC 560 (Ch) 

A brother and sister, jointly named as their father’s executors, found themselves on opposite sides of the same question: cremation in England, as their mother had received, or burial in India, as their father had allegedly told his daughter he wanted. The judge set the delay and expense of repatriation against seventy years of life in England and came down on the son’s side. Being named joint executors is no guarantee two people will actually agree. 

• Godwin v Godwin [2026] EWHC 923 (Ch) 

Two brothers, one wish, two interpretations. Their father had spent thirty years retired in France and had, decades earlier, written that he wanted to be buried there. One son wanted to honour burial in France in accordance with their father’s earlier written wishes. The other wanted cremation in England. The court ultimately ordered burial in England, finding that the deceased’s wishes deserved considerable weight but that the condition of the body, delay and practical difficulties associated with repatriation pointed against burial in France.  

• Bains v Arsalan [2026] EWHC 1597 (Fam) 

Perhaps the most distressing of the recent cases. A baby’s body stayed in a mortuary for years while criminal proceedings ran their course, after her mother was convicted of murdering her. That did not stop the mother trying to direct the funeral herself. The court applied the forfeiture principle and held that the mother was not entitled to receive a grant of administration. The child’s paternal grandmother was granted authority instead, and the child was laid to rest in the Sikh tradition she had been born into. 

• Barbus v Opritescu 

A 17-year-old boy, and his separated parents disagreeing over how to say goodbye to him. His father, a practising Orthodox Christian, wanted burial and objected to cremation on religious grounds. His mother, backed by the boy’s older brother, argued that cremation and scattering his ashes reflected who he actually was, not a faith he had not grown-up in. The court sided with her. A parent’s own convictions, however sincerely held, are not the same thing as their child’s likely wishes. 

What principles will the court apply? 

The court’s responsibility is not to choose the family member who argues hardest. Instead, it looks at what the deceased actually wanted, how clearly and recently that was expressed, and whether it is still practical to carry out. It weighs the views of close family, religious and cultural background, and the place the deceased was most connected to, which is not always where their family assumes. And it weighs delay. A body left unresolved for longer than necessary is itself a harm the court is trying to prevent. Where those with equal standing cannot agree, section 116 of the Senior Courts Act 1981 lets the court step in and grant limited authority to someone else, just for the purpose of arranging the funeral. 

How can disputes be avoided? 

For adults with an estate to plan, a properly drafted Will, made with a solicitor, is still the best protection available. It lets you name executors you trust to act sensibly, and it lets you set out your funeral wishes in your own words. But having a Will is not, on its own, enough. Patel and Godwin both involved a Will that either said nothing about funeral wishes or recorded them only informally decades earlier. Funeral wishes need to be written down clearly, and kept current, because a wish nobody wrote down carries no weight at all, and one written thirty years ago can carry less than you might expect. 

Three of the five cases above, though, involved someone who died too young to have made a Will in the first place. The general rule is that you need to be 18 to make a valid Will, and Theo Read shows how little comfort that age threshold actually provides in practice. For a baby, a child, or a teenager like Gabrielle Barbus, the protection has to come from somewhere else entirely: conversations with close family about beliefs, values and what would matter to them, and those conversations then being written down, whether by a parent, a guardian, or the young person themselves. It will not bind anyone, but as Bains and Barbus both show, when there is a dispute and nothing else to go on, the court reaches for exactly this kind of evidence, someone’s faith, their character, what they were known to have said, to work out what they would have wanted. 

Where family circumstances are more complicated, blended families, mixed faiths, relatives who already do not get on, a separate letter of wishes alongside a Will can go further still, and it is worth revisiting as circumstances change. 

One consistent theme across these cases is that delay tends to increase distress, cost and practical difficulty. If you think a dispute might be coming, get advice before positions harden. 

How Coodes can help 

Funeral disputes move quickly, and delay can make them significantly harder to resolve. If there is any whiff of disagreement over funeral arrangements, burial, cremation, ashes, repatriation, or who should be responsible for a loved one’s body, contact Coodes Solicitors’ Inheritance Disputes Team straight away. We can act quickly, including applying to the court urgently where needed, before delay or a decision taken in the heat of the moment makes things harder to put right.