Court of Protection Process - how bad is it?

[ProcrastinatorsAnonymous]

I'm the only child of parents in their late 70s, who are doing absolutely nothing to get their affairs in order. The most pressing is Power of Attorney. They haven't set this up for me, or for each other. I believe that my father is the only named person on most if not all of their bills / policies etc, so I worry that if he loses capacity first, my mum will have a very hard time sorting anything out - and it will be extremely difficult for me to help her. Same with medical decisions - as it stands, I believe we would need to go through the Court of Protection.

It's not that they are refusing to do this. Rather, they agree wholeheartedly that they must and they will, but then... They just don't. I bring it up every 6-9 months or so. Every time: 100% buy in, zero action. My father's health is noticeably declining and so this is becoming increasingly urgent.

What does Court of Protection process involve? I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has been through it how long it took / how complex.

If they just won't / don't ever do Power of Attorney, who steps in to help them if I can't?

Am I being unreasonable to push them towards Power of Attorney? I feel like I am strong-arming them, but they have said that they do want to do it... I am increasingly anxious about how I will cope with grief alongside mounds of admin and call centres and "computer says no" and forms - and I'm frustrated that they're not doing something that could make things so much easier, particularly as I have no siblings and will be handling all of this on my own.

No - but if they are then diagnosed without a POA, it is then too late. Going via the Court of Protection seems to be a complete nightmare - that is what this discussion is about. I don't think the fact that a bad thing isn't guaranteed to happen is a reason not to try to insure against it?

Thanks.

This is why it should be joint AND several I.e either both together or either independently.

Court of protection is a nightmare - financially and logistically. Everyone regardless of age or marital status should have an LPA.

even if someone has lost capacity, if they are lucid at the point the LPA is done, it would be valid. They would need to understand what they are doing and why but wouldn’t know what day of the week it is etc.

Agreed, you need to keep it vague. For example, if you were a lifelong vegan, you would want to know that when you went into care, your care home would serve you vegan meals.

Hi op I would put Martin Lewis on tv where he talks about the importance of this even for young people. Tell them if something happens to one of them or both you couldn’t handle the grief and fight of sorting out the financial situation. You just say a friend of a friend husband had a stroke and because he couldn’t speak she couldn’t access any of the money in the bank account the utility bills were in his name she had a nightmare sorting it out whilst visiting him every day. Op or another friend of a friends wife was found dead in bed and the bank account could not be accessed until the death certificate was issued and due to sudden death a postmortem was issued and it took ages poor fella had to borrow money off his family and friends to exist in top of his sudden loss you cannot cope with this and you want to start the new year with plans in place for everyone. These are not made up by the way genuine people aged early 50s.

My mum's death and the shambles that followed spurred my in-laws to sort their finances out.

Don't you have a friend who's just been through all this and wished her parents loved her enough to put the documentation in place to save her the trauma of dealing with all this whilst floundering at the prospect of losing a parent?

My mum also refused LPA or making a will. In the end the LPA wasn't needed as she died very very quickly but I would have absolutely resented her had I had to have gone through the process of court of protection whilst also supporting her through terminal cancer.

That's a good idea. I am going to try and get all the information assembled and then speak to my dad by himself somehow. I think he might be more receptive to it as he knows how my mum is - they are still married. Also, he is someone who likes doing things by himself and probably wouldn't like the idea of the costs associated with the alternative.

One angle I also thought of is if one of them has issues before the other, then surely that person will end up in the situation before I would as their offspring. Then they'd wishing they'd applied for the POA so they could deal with their spouse's affairs as next of kin?

I will look into what happens if it isn't done and if a relative doesn't step in. I'm assuming social services/the local authority must take some responsibility and apply on the person's behalf or something. 🤷🏽‍♀️

FIL was a ditherer until DH told him that if he didn't set it up DH wouldn't be able to afford to and the council would have to take over and get to make the decisions about what his money was spent on. He sorted it very rapidly after that.

If they are ok to do it and just don't seem to get round to it, then why not just do most of it yourself.
My parents wanted them so I printed all the forms out from the gov website and filled most of it in for them. They just had to sign and their neighbour witnessed them.
Apart from having to ask them some questions their effort was fairly minimal.
There's absolutely no need to pay a solicitor or drag them along to one to do the forms.
They are long and take some time to fill in but there's nothing complicated about them. Just work through them point by point.

It’s pretty easy to do yourself online and it can be witnessed by any number of people - you don’t need professional witnesses like you do for a passport
the forms guide you through how to do it in most simple way possible
the only thing I got wrong is I did make sure the papers were signed in the exact order they should have been and had to redo one. It was my fault as I didn’t read the instructions carefully. Unless you can find a really cheap
soljcitor I would save money and do it yourself

Send them a link to this thread. Plenty of examples showing why POA is better

Whilst an LPA is easier we had a very positive experience with the Court of Protection. MiL had a history of mental illness and lacked full capacity to deal with finances for a long time, but muddled through. When she developed dementia too we instructed an experienced solicitor to get an order and it was fairly quick, not that expensive and we were able to get her house sold and savings rearranged. If anyone is in this situation I’d advise to get a local solicitor who deals with these matters regularly rather than a big firm which will charge a lot more. It was easy for us to get the medical reports, MiL was obsessed that Satan was scribbling on her bank notes, abstracting electricity etc. She was a lovely person and very relieved not to have to worry about money anymore.

Thank you. My husband and I are pretty diligent form fillers (!) so I think we'll be OK to work through it ourselves. I will have to travel across the country to do this, so will need to get my parents to think in advance about who they want to witness (a neighbour I imagine) and then arrange to get it all signed in one day. That sounds simpler too, as all dates on the form are then the same?

I'm not confident they have a working printer, so might even take my own printer down with my laptop, so if we encounter a problem and have to print something out again, we can do that!

I'm not sure they'd enjoy seeing my clear frustration with them in black and white!

Meno is 100% correct. Stop them messing you around. Both my parents wanted me to be POA but quite honestly I would have been furious if they hadn’t. They quickly accepted my help and support before POA. In fact they battered me and my late DF decided it was best to set up POA.

I am going to be blunt here but it’s selfish behaviour for them to duck and dive completing it but maybe they are nervous if it sounds as though you are expecting them to sort it out. If you print out the forms, present to them, they truly have no excuse to then claim to want to think about it.

My parents were the same - wanted to do it but never quite got round to it. In the end they agreed to do it, I went round & we did it online together, printed them off & got them witnessed by their friend. Sent them off & I got copies in the post. It was very stress free in the end but just took us so long to get there.

What changed their mind in the end was knowing someone whose parents didn't do that & the stress & cost it caused them (their children - my parents friend) that made them see that they didn't want me or my siblings to go through that in the future.

I'm not trying to teach your grandma to suck eggs, but I found out a lot of people don't realise that POA ends on death.
When we were registering my MIL's at the bank, the lady there told us it's not uncommon for people to think that as they had POA and the relative had died, they could still access their bank accounts to sort out any payments for stuff, not including funeral costs which are usually allowed. Once the relative has died, then it's the executors who have to deal with it after getting probate.

When they're signed, get them signed and witnessed with the same pen. If it's signed with another pen, in a different colour for example, it can be thought that they weren't signed at the same time and will be rejected.