Type 1: Property and financial affairs
This covers money and property: operating bank accounts, paying bills and the mortgage, collecting pensions and benefits, dealing with tax, managing investments, and selling or renting out your home.
It has a distinctive feature. A property and financial affairs LPA can be used while you still have capacity, if you allow it.That makes it useful well before any question of capacity arises — during a long hospital stay, an extended period abroad, or simply where physical illness makes managing paperwork difficult. You choose when registering whether it takes effect immediately or only on loss of capacity.
Type 2: Health and welfare
This covers decisions about you rather than your assets: your day-to-day care and routine, medical treatment, where you live, and whether you move into residential care.
Unlike the financial LPA, a health and welfare LPA can only be used once you have lost the capacity to make the relevant decision yourself. It also contains a specific choice: whether your attorneys have authority to give or refuse consent to life-sustaining treatment. You decide that when you make the document, not your family in a hospital corridor.
Why one is not enough
People often make the financial LPA and stop, because it feels like the practical one. Then a stroke or a dementia diagnosis arrives, and the family who can pay the care home invoice discover they have no legal standing to be consulted on which care home it should be. The care team must act in the person’s best interests, and family views are considered — but without a health and welfare LPA nobody has authority to decide.
The reverse also happens: relatives with a welfare LPA who cannot access the account that pays for the care.
Cost and timing
Each LPA costs £92 to register with the Office of the Public Guardian — £184 for both. Fee reductions are available if your gross annual income is under £12,000, and exemptions apply if you receive certain means-tested benefits. Registration currently takes around 8 to 10 weeks if the application is error-free.
An LPA cannot be made once capacity is lost. Nor can it be used before it is registered, so leaving it in a drawer unregistered defeats the purpose.
Talk to us
Our private client team prepares and registers both types of LPA. To discuss yours, call 0151 422 0982.