More than 50,000 power of attorney applications were rejected last year because of mistakes.

A Freedom of Information request by Hargreaves Lansdown revealed that in the financial year 2023/24, 50,918 power of attorney applications were turned down.

Some 30,180 financial LPAs were rejected and 20,738 health and welfare LPAs.

Data from The Office of the Public Guardian showed that during the year 1,370,546 applications were received, meaning the rejection rate stood at 3.7%.



Sarah Coles, head of personal finance at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “The number of people applying for an LPA has shot up in recent years. There are 8,039,546 powers of attorney on the register right now.

"In 2023/24 there were more than 1.37m applications – up 28% from a year earlier and up more than 60% in five years.”

She said there was a significant backlog in applications as a result. In 2023/24 it took an average of 76 working days to process each one.

“That means if a mistake is made, that will prolong the agony, because the application will be rejected.”

She pointed out that there are changes in the pipeline, which should help streamline the process, and mean people can do more online. However, it will include more robust ID checks, and will change the system, so that instead of either the donor or the attorney being able to register the LPA, only the donor will be able to.

Hargreaves has compiled a list of a dozen common mistakes to avoid when people apply for a LPA:

1. Spelling names wrong. ID checks will fail if the name is spelled wrong. They can also fail if people have muddled the order of first and middle names.

2. Signing in the wrong order. There are five sets of signatures needed 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.

3. Missing information. The applications need the names, addresses and dates of birth of the donor and attorneys – in full. Every section also needs to be completed. Sometimes people won’t fully understand the section on how they want attorneys to act, so they’ll leave it blank. This will lead to the application being rejected.

4. Illegible information. If checkers can’t read handwriting or understand corrections, they will reject the application.

5. Bad corrections. If anyone makes a mistake on the form, they need to cross out the mistake, correct it, and then initial it. It needs to be initialled by the person who made the mistake. If Tipp-Ex is used, or the correction is not initialled – or the wrong person initialises it – it’ll be rejected.

6. Poor notifications. Part of the process of registering means notifying specific people. There’s a specific form that has to be sent to each of them. Anyone doing both a health and welfare LPA and a financial one, and notifying the same people, will need to send them two forms each – one for each LPA – because they’re treated as separate applications

7. Confusing instructions and preferences. Instructions specify things that attorneys must do and preferences are those things that people would like them to do, so the language matters. Anyone including an instruction to use funds to benefit someone else – like making gifts –is likely to fail because it might conflict with the duty to act in the person’s best interests. It means it’s best to include this as a preference.

8. Issuing conflicting instructions. Take care that instructions don’t conflict with something else in the document. If, for example, attorneys have been appointed ‘jointly and separately’ it means they can make any decisions on their own or together.

9. Telling attorneys they should act in the interests of anyone else. They act for the person alone, so they can’t put someone’s partner or children first.

10. Trying to dictate how replacement attorneys act. The form allows for replacement attorneys to be named if something happens to the original attorneys. However, people can’t issue instructions for when this is done – so for example they can’t say they should step in when attorneys are on holiday. People can’t give an attorney power to appoint a replacement either.

11. Trying to give them the power to change your will. This isn’t allowed, so the application will fail.

12. Adding the wrong type of instructions. If anyone adds financial instructions to a health and welfare LPA it will fail, and vice versa. If people want them to be able to cover both, they’ll need both types of LPA.