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| TX: 23.11.05 - Dementia: Enduring Attorney PRESENTER: JOHN WAITE |
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| THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. WAITE Now during our series on dementia this past month we've received many calls and e-mails asking for advice on how to manage the finances of someone who has the condition and therefore is no longer able to do it for themselves. A listener Mr Telford from Huddersfield wasn't alone in telling us that the best advice he ever had in caring for his mother, who had Alzheimer's, was to get what's called enduring power of attorney and to get it early, he says. Well to explain more we're joined now by solicitor Caroline Bielanska, who's chair of Solicitors for the Elderly, a national organisation of legal professionals who provide and promote legal advice for older people and their carers. Caroline, what is enduring power of attorney and how is it different to ordinary power of attorney? BIELANSKA I think the starting point is what's an ordinary power. A power of attorney is whereby one person appoints another or other people to make decisions and are given authority to manage certain aspects or all aspects of their finances and their property. Now an ordinary power of attorney will stop being valid if the person who gave the power loses their mental capacity. And enduring power operates in exactly the same way but will continue to be effective legally if the person becomes or is becoming mentally incapable, provided it is registered with a court, known as the court of protection. WAITE And what does the enduring power allow you to do, I mean what is the particular advantage in this for people with dementia? BIELANSKA Well it allows you to continue to operate accounts so you can pay bills, write cheques, buy, sell shares, sell a property - do whatever is necessary for the individual who has lost their mental capacity. So it's very much up for the individual to try and anticipate and say well what would I like to happen if this event occurred and the power be drafted appropriately. So you can have it very general, get on and do everything, or quite specific, saying I only want them to be able to sell my house or access my bank account. WAITE And our listener Mr Telford says get it early, I mean when should people think about setting this up? BIELANSKA The earlier the better really because none of us know if or at what point we could lose our mental capacity, so it's pretty much like an insurance police against a possible event that may happen. As we know that with dementia it does principally affect older people and so with age one needs to think about having an enduring power of attorney. WAITE Well another listener who e-mailed about this was Michelle Poole from Cheltenham in Gloucestershire. Her mother was diagnosed with vascular dementia a year ago and before Michelle and her sisters took over control of her finances she was losing large amounts of money and causing herself considerable distress as she struggled on trying to manager her own accounts. POOLE We started to get huge phone bills, which my mother, at that point, denied utterly of actually ever making any of these calls, and we're talking of bills of like £300, £400 and we noticed that a lot of them were 0900 numbers, promising prizes and premiums and god knows what and my mother was making numbers of these calls on a daily basis. And then along with that was the problem with utility bills, she just didn't pay them and so we had threatening letters threatening to cut her off and at one point she would be bullied by people on the phone, she would then get other suppliers, at one time we actually had two suppliers running concurrently, both coming with bills. At that point we were only starting to really get an idea that we really had to get more proactive and get more involved really and taking things over. We thought well now was the time to invoke the power of attorney, we had no idea really what it really meant. But we had huge problems with that, we had huge problems with her solicitor because she felt my mother was alright and we knew that mother wasn't. When people have got dementia for very short bursts of time it seems that they're very, very plausible but the banks and the various other people definitely felt that we weren't treating our mother in a fair way. It was a lot of stress, she was complaining to the bank, she still is complaining to the bank. She complains about the fact that the power of attorney was put into effect, even though she agreed to it and the bank they actually nearly went into meltdown at a call centre on one occasion because she was ringing the phone constantly. WAITE Michelle Poole. Well Caroline Bielanska, as I say you're a solicitor who specialises in working with older people, how common is Michelle's experience there? BIELANSKA Well I think it's fairly common. I think what often happens is there is a crisis within a family where the person who's getting dementia is starting to deteriorate and cannot remember what they've paid, what they've done, they enter into contracts which they probably shouldn't do if they had full capacity and were speaking to their family and informing them about it. But also older people feel very vulnerable, particularly if they have any insight into the fact that their memory is declining. WAITE And is there a danger, just to flip this over now, that this power of enduring - this enduring power - can be used against the best interests of the person with dementia? I mean what rights do you still have once you've given over power to your attorney? BIELANSKA Well I think the starting point has always got to be the person that you appoint must be someone you trust absolutely, it's a very valuable document - it's like giving someone a blank cheque and the title deeds to your house - they could pretty much, if they were of the mind, rip you off. So choice is the starting point. The next thing I'd say is that if the person retains any level of capacity they can of course revoke the power and stop it being effective. But once they've lost capacity the enduring power needs to be registered with the Court of Protection and so you're then waiting for a whistle blower to contact the court to say well something's going amiss here, something's going wrong and that may well be a social worker, it could be a GP, it could be just the neighbour who rings up the court and says we are concerned. The Public Guardianship Office, which is the admin department if you like of the Court of Protection, actually has an investigation team who will look at and try and deal with financial abuse where of course someone is under their jurisdiction. WAITE Caroline Bielanska of Solicitors for the Elderly thank very much. Back to the You and Yours homepage The BBC is not responsible for external websites |
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