Ordinary Power of Attorney for long term

John_Pierpoint

The family can work its way through the pages of bumph and complicated systems themselves; provided the donor of the power of attorney still has mental capacity. It requires information to be sent to all sorts of people, with a potential interest, and they need to sign off on what is happening.
There are TWO lasting powers of attorney costing £130 each; one for care and one for finance.

It can take months to be granted, I had to finance my uncle for the last three months of his life and for weeks afterwards I got meaningless queries about the forms I had paid a solicitor to help me complete.

So do it now - Have fun, the odds are that you will never need it.

Savvy_Sue

Bejay1 wrote: »

and you have to notify relatives, so no privacy.

I'd say that was a GOOD thing. I'd trust all my siblings to deal honourably with my mother's affairs, but if one of them applied to do so I'd like to know. If I didn't trust them, I'd want to know even more!!!

John_Pierpoint

Are we getting confused here?

If one relative is having what all the others see as "undue influence" over (say) a parent, they would have to demonstrate that the parent had "lost their marbles".

There is nothing to stop the assumed compos mentis parent from signing an existing ordinary "power of attorney".

One of my cousins has exactly this situation at the moment. The parent is definitely "away with the fairies" BUT a casual observer would conclude that the parent was completely rational, though perhaps displaying "old fashioned" values. ["This is my house - I can manage - what right have you to come interfering in my affairs............".]. Fortunately the cousin has combined "power of attorney and "enduring power of attorney" and the household trundles on.
There is the occasional financial clerk who opens the "confusion" page of their manual (if they have such a novelty or any training what so ever) and mutters "but this is over 18 months old".

Of course if the cousin with the PoE was a venal fraudster, the parent could be robbed blind - do you think that the right (but not the obligation) to fill in pages of bumph and send them off with a £260 cheque, would make any difference to the victim?

I suppose in well organised families, those that have made a will and a lasting power of attorney, the paperwork might have made it "easier" to replace the "venal" attorney, with one appointed by the court - the result would be more "just" but probably more expensive.

I have no perfect solution, but I would advocate that families stay in touch for practical reasons, even if they don't particularly like each other, and that anyone claiming power of attorney should be required to keep and produce simple annual accounts, if challenged.

Though fraud is the world's largest crime - I cannot see the criminal system taking much interest in what can be presented as a "domestic" dispute.