What Happens If You Don't Have an LPA? The Consequences

What actually happens

When someone loses mental capacity without a Lasting Power of Attorney, there is no grace period and no common-sense exception for family. Authority simply stops existing until a court creates it. Here is what that means, area by area.

Money

Banks freeze accounts when they learn a customer has lost capacity — including, in many cases, joint accounts, because the bank must protect a vulnerable customer's share. Direct debits stop. Care bills arrive with no way to pay them from the very savings that were set aside for exactly this.

The house cannot be sold, remortgaged or let, even to fund the owner's own care. Pensions and investments sit unmanaged. None of this is the bank being difficult; without legal authority, helping would be the crime.

Health and care

Without a health and welfare LPA, doctors decide treatment on a best-interests basis. Family are consulted, but consultation is not authority: if relatives disagree with a medical recommendation, or with a hospital's choice of care home placement, they have no legal standing to insist. Wishes about life-sustaining treatment that were never written into an LPA carry moral weight but not legal force.

The Court of Protection route

The only fix after capacity is lost is applying to the Court of Protection for a deputyship. Be realistic about what that involves:

• Time. Months, commonly the better part of a year, during which nobody can lawfully manage the person's affairs.
• Money. Court fees, medical assessment costs, usually solicitor fees, and an annual supervision charge for as long as the deputyship lasts. Families routinely spend thousands of pounds to obtain powers an LPA would have granted for £92.
• Oversight. Deputies file annual reports to the OPG, and larger decisions can need specific court approval. It is a permanent administrative relationship with the state, where an LPA is a document in a drawer.
• The decision is the court's. A judge appoints the deputy. Usually it is a family member; sometimes, especially where family disagree, it is a professional deputy whose fees come out of the estate.

The quieter costs

The financial comparison is stark enough, but families who have been through this describe other losses. The months of limbo while a parent needed care nobody could arrange. Siblings falling out under pressure that a signed document would have removed. The discovery that Dad's views on being kept alive artificially were known to everyone and binding on no one.

The comparison, in one place

The fix is disproportionately small

Every consequence on this page is prevented by a document that is free to make and costs £92 per LPA to register — with a qualified estate planner checking your answers by phone before you sign. If your concern is for a parent rather than yourself, start with our guide to that conversation. The one mistake that cannot be undone is waiting until the person the document is for can no longer sign it.