Looking after the finances of an elderly relative

An application to the Court of Protection is necessary if someone’s financial or personal welfare affairs need to be looked after on their behalf.

Common situations include where relatives of an elderly client has been taken into long term residential care. The individual may already be unable to manage their affairs, eg because of dementia or a stroke. If the elderly client lacks the required mental capacity to appoint somebody to act on his or her behalf by an Lasting Powers of Attorney (LPA) then the only option available is for someone (usually one of the relatives) to make an application to the Court of Protection to be appointed as the elderly client’s Deputy.

In the first instance we would always recommend that a client makes an LPA when they have the capacity to do so. However, we often find that people have not made an LPA in advance and both they and their relatives are left “in limbo” as to how to proceed.

If someone has not made an LPA and they subsequently lose capacity then there needs to be an application to the Court of Protection asking the Court to appoint a Deputy to act for that individual. Their role is similar to the one an Attorney would have done otherwise.

The elderly client will often own their own home which will then be unoccupied if they are now residing in a care home. Relatives will come under pressure from the Local Authority to sell the property in order to pay for care home fees.

The only course of action is to have someone appointed as their deputy in order to manage their affairs. Until the Order appointing the Deputy is made, nothing can be done with an empty property and there is no valid legal way of accessing the elderly client’s bank accounts to pay bills and deal with their financial affairs in general.