A lasting power of attorney lets people you trust step in and make decisions for you if you ever cannot make them yourself. There are two types, they cover entirely separate territory, and a surprising number of people set up one believing it covers the other. Here is the difference, plainly, and how to work out what your situation needs.
The property and financial affairs LPA
This one covers money and property: running your bank accounts, paying bills and the mortgage, managing investments and pensions, claiming benefits, and if necessary selling your home. Without it, a partner cannot operate even a joint account properly frozen by the bank, let alone your sole accounts.
A useful feature people miss: you choose when it can be used. It can be restricted to take effect only if you lose mental capacity, or it can be usable as soon as it is registered, with your consent while you still have capacity. The second option sounds alarming and is often the practical choice: it lets your attorney handle things when you are physically unable, in hospital, housebound, abroad, while you remain fully in charge of the decisions.
The health and welfare LPA
This one covers you rather than your money: where you live, including any move into care, day-to-day matters like diet and routine, who visits you, and medical treatment. It contains one decision heavy enough to have its own section on the form: whether your attorneys can accept or refuse life-sustaining treatment on your behalf. You answer that question yourself, in advance, when you make the LPA.
Unlike the financial LPA, a health and welfare LPA can only ever be used once you have lost the capacity to make the particular decision yourself. While you can decide, you decide.
So which do you need?
Ask what would actually happen tomorrow. If you were in a coma for three months, who could pay your mortgage? That is the financial LPA. If dementia took your capacity in fifteen years, who would choose your care home, and would doctors listen to them? That is the health and welfare LPA. The two risks are independent, which is why the standard advice is to make both at once: same attorneys or different ones, one signing session, complete cover. Most people who make one and stop have simply run out of energy, not risk.
Decisions you make on both forms
- Attorneys: usually one to four people; a spouse plus an adult child is the classic pairing
- How they act: jointly (every decision unanimous, safer but fragile if one attorney dies) or jointly and severally (each can act alone, the flexible default)
- Replacements: substitutes who step in if an original attorney cannot act
- People to notify: optional, but telling someone the LPA is being registered is a sensible safeguard
- Preferences and instructions: guidance your attorneys should weigh, and binding restrictions if you want them
The part everyone underestimates: registration
An LPA is useless until registered with the Office of the Public Guardian, and registration takes weeks at best. Registering at the moment of crisis means months of paralysis exactly when decisions cannot wait, which is why LPAs are made and registered in advance, while everything is fine. The costs are covered separately, including the £82 registration fee per LPA.
Doing it with Willful
Willful prepares both types, £99 per LPA, through the same kind of guided interview as our wills: the official forms filled correctly, jointly-or-severally explained where you choose it, the life-sustaining treatment section handled with the care it deserves, and an SRA-regulated solicitor reviewing everything before you sign. If you are not sure whether you need one or both, the honest answer for most adults with either assets or opinions is both.