Can my DH & family invoke POA

[Notsuchafattynow]

My MIL is living alone, with Alzheimers and potters along quite the thing, supported by family going round once a day. (84).

My DH and his sisters have POA (finances and social care).

We had a shock today as when checking her phone, DH saw she had signed up to a cold caller upselling Sky. She does not watch tv etc and I was able to phone them up, pretending to be her in order to cancel.

I know this was wrong, but we were panicking. But it's made me realise we need to know the proper approach.

1. should we contact all her utilities and services and ask them to log her as vulnerable and not to contact her directly (and go via POAs)

2. we realise she's now vulnerable to signing up to anything. Would she be responsible for anything financial she signs up to?

Anything else we need to put in place?

You could reach out to adult social care and ask them to carry out a capacity assessment so then you will know whether she has capacity. They can also do a needs assessment at the same time and then you can put in place any care or help that might be needed.

if MIL doesn’t have capacity or if she does and the POA allows you to act in that scenario (and she is happy for you to) then yes you can register the POA at all of her banks, utilities providers etc and take control of her accounts under the POA.

the risk of scams is an awful one. You could file a protective statement with the main credit providers which will flag to anyone running a credit check for the purpose of opening a new credit account for MiL that she has Alzheimer’s and no credit is to be taken out without consulting with the POA first.

It may reach the point where to better protect her you will need to take away her bank cards and give her something like a go Henry so she can have some spending money but there isn’t the risk of her emptying a bank account.

you may also wish to start monitoring her post. An option under a POA is to set up a postal redirect with RM so that it comes to you.

Just have a read of the financial PoA - as long as it says you can use it while she still has mental capacity, you can go ahead and make an appointment at the bank. However, obviously you should ask her if she is ok with you helping out with the paperwork, because obviously you should, but also as they will write to her about it.

Age Uk have good advice on scams (I’m not saying sky is a scam).

A lot of the people I meet at work have BT call guardian if they still have a landline, which could be helpful.