New freedom of information (FOI) data obtained by Quilter, the financial adviser and wealth manager has revealed that a Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) application was finally processed after 2,777 working days, which is the equivalent of over 10 years.
The data was revealed following a request to the Ministry of Justice regarding the shortest and longest wait times for LPA processing. In addition, in the 2024/25 tax year an application was processed after over six years.
Prior to this, in the tax years from 2019/20 to 2022/23 the longest wait time was over three years while the shortest wait time was 20 days.
| Years | Shortest | Longest |
| 2019 / 2020 | 21 | 781 |
| 2020 / 2021 | 21 | 844 |
| 2021 / 2022 | 21 | 813 |
| 2022 / 2023 | 20 | 983 |
| 2023 / 2024 | 21 | 2777 |
| 2024 / 2025 (until end of August) | 21 | 1672 |
These numbers represent working days, not calendar days.
Applications may take longer to be registered if they contain errors that need to be rectified by the customer. The time taken for customers to remedy these errors is included in the length of time recorded.
A LPA is a legal document that allows you to appoint one or more people to make decisions on your behalf if you lose the capacity to make those decisions yourself.
There are two types of LPA, health and welfare or property and finance. It is vital when you are putting an LPA in place that you consider who is the most appropriate person or people to be appointed as your attorney(s).
Five reasons why LPA applications get rejected and then take a long time to process:
1. Incorrect signing order: The donor, certificate provider or attorneys have not signed and dated the LPAs in the correct order – the donor must sign the LPAs first, then the certificate provider, then the attorneys, and thereafter, the person registering the LPA must sign again (either the attorney or the donor). Parties often sign the LPAs in the wrong order, which is not allowed.
2. Missing information: This is often the date that the donor, attorneys or certificate provider have signed the LPAs, or sometimes their signatures have not been witnessed. The LPAs must be completed in their entirety before they can be submitted to the OPG to be registered.
3. Incorrect witnesses: Parties often use witnesses to witness signatures who are not allowed to be used – for example, an attorney cannot witness the signature of a donor because there is a conflict of interest in doing so.
4. Unworkable LPA requests: The donor might appoint attorneys to make decisions one way, and then include instructions to make them act differently, making the LPAs unworkable– for example, if you have three attorneys appointed in your LPA, and the LPA says attorneys should act ‘jointly and severally’, you cannot then include an instruction in the LPA to say that decisions are made by majority vote, as by acting jointly and severally, all of the Attorneys have equal power to act and make decisions.
5. Not providing full names: Parties often submit LPAs without giving the full information required – for example, witnesses often cause an LPA to be rejected by not noting their full details on the LPAs– the witnesses must give their full name (including their full middle names), and not just their initials with their surname. This is important as banks and other financial institutions may refuse to grant the attorney access to funds if there are spelling mistakes or discrepancies in the documentation.
Shaun Moore, tax and financial planning expert at Quilter: “It is shocking that an application for such a vital element of financial planning would take so long to process. While we do not know the circumstances that led to such a long wait time, the data shows that it is not uncommon for applicants to have to wait years for the approval of their Lasting Power of Attorney registration.
“Part of the reason for this may be that errors are made on the applications, and because the most common method of application was via post, the rectification of errors took longer, either on the Office for Public Guardian’s side or the applicant’s side.
“The relatively new method of digitally applying for Lasting Power of Attorney should help to ensure that errors in applications can be rectified more quickly, reducing these mammoth wait times.
“It cannot be overstated how important an LPA can be. However, it is worth remembering that one can only be drafted while you have mental capacity – once you’ve lost capacity, it is too late. While we can only hope for the best, we should prepare for the worst
