The Office of the Public Guardian data shows that 1,370,546 LPA applications were received during the year, making the rejection rate 3.7%.
The figures were obtained by Hargreaves Lansdown via a Freedom of Information request.
What is an LPA?
A LPA is a legal document that allows you to appoint someone – the attorney – to make decisions on your behalf if you are unable to do so.
There are two kinds of LPA. The property and financial affairs LPA allows your attorney to make financial decisions and those about your property. The health and welfare LPA means they can make decisions about your medical needs and care.
The idea is that you can nominate someone, or a number of people, to make decisions for you if you become unable to do so.
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An LPA provides an opportunity for your family to support you, keeping an eye on your finances and protecting you from some of the things that become more likely – like missing bills, spending erratically or becoming a victim of fraud.
Without an LPA, your family can apply for deputyship to enable key decisions, but this is more complicated and expensive, and tends to confer more limited powers. You also lose the opportunity to pick someone you want for the job, and decide how they make decisions.
Sarah Coles, head of personal finance at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “Drawing up and registering a lasting power of attorney can make an enormous difference for you and your loved ones if an accident or medical condition means you’re unable to make decisions for yourself. However, this is only true if your application succeeds, and the Ministry of Justice says more than 50,000 of them failed in the most recent financial year.”
The most common reasons LPAs fail
Spelling names wrong
ID checks will fail if the name is spelled wrong. They can also fail if you have muddled the order of first and middle names.
Signing in the wrong order
There are five sets of signatures you need on the application, and they have to be done in the right order. If the dates on the signatures show they were signed out of order, it will be rejected.
Missing information
You need the names, addresses and dates of birth of the donor and attorneys – in full. You also need to complete every section.
Illegible information or bad corrections
If your handwriting can’t be read or corrections understood, the LPA will be rejected. If you make a mistake on the form, you need to cross out the mistake, correct it, and then initial it.
Poor notifications
Part of the process of registering means notifying specific people/organisations that you’ve said you will tell. There are separate forms for health and financial LPAs.
Confusing instructions and preferences
Instructions specify things that your attorneys must do and preferences are those things that you would like them to do, so the language matters.
Issuing conflicting instructions
Take care that instructions don’t conflict with something else in the document. If, for example, you have appointed attorneys ‘jointly and separately’, it means they can make any decisions on their own or together, so you can’t include an instruction that says one attorney must do as the other says.
Trying to dictate how replacement attorneys act
The form allows for replacement attorneys to be named if something happens to the original attorneys. However, you can’t issue instructions for when this is done.
Trying to give them the power to change your will
This isn’t allowed, so the LPA application will fail.
Adding the wrong type of instructions
If you add financial instructions to a health and welfare LPA, it will fail, and vice versa. If you want them to be able to cover both, you’ll need both types of LPA.
