What actually happens if you don't have an LPA

Everyone we meet has heard the phrase "Lasting Power of Attorney". Almost nobody can tell us what happens if you don't have one. So here's what happens.

We'll take you through it properly, because the vague answer — "it gets complicated" — doesn't help anyone understand what they're actually facing. The detail matters. The specific, practical detail about what a family has to do on a Tuesday morning when someone they care about has lost capacity and there's no document in place.

When someone loses capacity without an LPA

Say a parent has a stroke. They're in hospital, they're stable, but they're not going to be able to manage their own finances or make their own decisions again. They have no Lasting Power of Attorney.

Nobody — not the spouse, not the adult children, not the next of kin — has the legal authority to touch that person's money. Their bank accounts are inaccessible for all practical purposes. Their pension payments arrive each month and nobody can direct them. The mortgage or rental payment still needs to be made, but the funds to make it are locked. If the family needs to sell a property to fund residential care, they cannot. Not yet. Not without going to court.

The mechanism that exists to deal with this situation is called a Deputyship Order. It comes from the Court of Protection.

The Court of Protection process

The Court of Protection is a division of the High Court. It has the power to appoint a deputy — someone given legal authority to act on behalf of a person who has lost capacity, making decisions about their finances, property, or welfare.

To get a Deputyship Order, you apply to the court. This involves multiple forms. The application fee for a property and affairs deputyship is currently just over £400. You submit everything and you wait.

The typical wait from application to order is 8 to 12 months. In some cases it takes longer. The Court of Protection is not fast. It is thorough, it is formal, and it is slow.

While you're waiting, the practical situation does not pause. Care fees fall due. Direct debits run. Bills accumulate. If the person needs to move into residential care — and if their home needs to be sold to fund it — none of that can proceed legally until the order arrives. Families in this position are managing real, expensive, urgent problems with no legal authority to act.

The Court of Protection process takes 8 to 12 months on average. Fees run into thousands over time. And families are navigating all of it while also caring for someone they're already grieving.

What families do in the meantime

Some things can be managed informally during the wait. Shared accounts. Joint cards. Day-to-day items that don't require formal authority. But anything significant — instructing a solicitor on a property sale, accessing a pension, managing investments, dealing with a care home's legal requirements — typically requires the legal authority that only the Deputyship Order provides.

We've spoken to families who borrowed from their own savings to cover a parent's care home fees while waiting for court approval to access the parent's own funds. Families who kept a house in reasonable condition during the wait — paying for repairs and maintenance out of their own pockets — on a property they couldn't sell, couldn't remortgage, and had no legal standing over.

Care homes, for their part, are running businesses. They are generally sympathetic to difficult family situations. They charge interest on late payments regardless.

When a Deputyship Order arrives, it comes with conditions

An Lasting Power of Attorney, once registered, is a straightforward legal document. The attorneys named in it have authority. They act. There is no ongoing oversight, no requirement to report to anyone, no annual accountability process — unless the donor specifically included conditions that require it.

A Deputyship Order works differently.

Deputies are supervised by the Office of the Public Guardian. Every year, deputies managing finances above a certain threshold must submit a formal report — a deputy annual report — detailing the decisions they've made and the money they've managed. This report is reviewed by the OPG.

There is a supervision fee for this. It currently ranges from around £35 to £320 per year depending on the level of supervision required. This continues for as long as the person lacks capacity, which could be many years.

The total cost of the Deputyship route — court fees, solicitor fees if you use one (and most families do, because the forms are complex), annual supervision fees across multiple years — typically runs into several thousand pounds.

The decisions that get harder without any document

Some decisions don't just get delayed without a Lasting Power of Attorney. They become genuinely difficult to make.

Residential care decisions are one example. If a person needs to move from home into a care setting, and their property needs to be sold to fund it, a sale cannot legally complete without authority to sign. A Deputyship Order provides that authority eventually. But care homes are not set up to hold a room for 8 to 12 months while a court application processes.

Medical decisions are a separate but equally important issue. A health and welfare Lasting Power of Attorney gives the named attorneys a formal legal role in decisions about care, treatment, and living arrangements. Without one, those decisions are made by clinicians acting in the person's "best interests" under the Mental Capacity Act 2005.

In most cases that process works reasonably well. But it means the family has no formal standing. A consultant can choose to involve family members or not. Decisions about resuscitation, about treatment plans, about care settings — none of these formally belong to the family. They are consulted as a matter of practice and goodwill, not as a matter of right.

The health and welfare Lasting Power of Attorney doesn't give attorneys control over clinical decisions. But it gives them a seat at the table. It means that when the consultant discusses options, the attorney is not in the room on goodwill. They're in the room on rights.

The question that focuses things

When we speak to someone who's been meaning to sort an Lasting Power of Attorney for a while, we ask them one thing.

If the situation changed tomorrow — a stroke, an accident, a sudden diagnosis — and you needed to take over someone's finances on their behalf: how would you pay for their care this week?

Most people go quiet.

Not because they're evasive. Because they've never thought it through to that specific, practical point. They've thought about Lasting Power of Attorneys in the abstract — as a document, as a preparation, as something to sort eventually. They haven't thought about the care home invoice arriving on a Thursday, and the bank account that nobody can legally access.

We're not going to use the word "devastating". We'll just say: it's slow, and expensive, and hard to live through when you're already grieving someone who's still alive.