Services We Offer To Attorneys

If you have been appointed as an Attorney for either property and financial affairs or health and welfare, there are specific duties you must comply with. 

You may not be sure on what those duties are or the best way to make sure you carry them out. You may have questions about how to be an attorney or what you are responsible for.

There is usually quite a bit of time between signing the initial paperwork, and then having to use the Lasting Power of Attorney. You must make sure you check the Lasting Power of Attorney for any instructions or preferences that have been included, you must make sure you help the donor make their own decisions as much as they can, and all decisions must be in the donor’s best interests.

Property and Financial Affairs

We can help you understand what you need to do in respect of:

• Bank and building society accounts.
• Keeping records of how you spend their money and the decisions you have made.
• Claiming expenses as Attorney
• Managing a property
• Buying or selling a property
• Registering with pensions or investments
• Claiming benefits
• Paying care home fees and completing financial assessments
• Gifting and donating the donor’s money.
• Statutory Wills
• Maintaining someone

It is important to remember that you must keep the donor’s money separate from your own.

Health and Welfare

We can help you understand what you need to do in respect of:

• Where the donor lives
• Refusing or consenting to treatment on behalf of the Donor
• Taking the Donor on holiday
• Disputes between family members on best interest decisions

It is important to remember you can only make decisions under a health and welfare lasting power of attorney when the donor loses capacity.

Office of the Public Guardian

Attorneys are supervised by the Office of the Public Guardian; they can check what you are doing and may arrange to visit you or the Donor. If you do not comply with your duties properly, you could be reported and investigated by the Office of the Public Guardian, and they could stop you from acting as an attorney.

You need to inform them if:

• You or the Donor change address
• You or the Donor change their name.
• If the Donor or an Attorney dies
• If you start acting as replacement attorney
• You wish to step down as an Attorney.

Further authority

Sometimes you may need to make an application to the Court of Protection for authority to do something that falls outside of your general powers, for example:

• The Attorney wants to purchase the Donors property.
• The Attorney wants to pay themselves family care payments.
• Making significant gifts or loans from the Donor’s funds
• Statutory Will applications
• Sometimes an application is required to remove the Donor as Trustee if they have lost capacity.

We can help by offering you advice and guidance, either at the very beginning when you start to take over or when you have big decisions to make and you don’t know the best course of action to take.