Is this a backward step?

[Jcloughie]

We are just tidying up our joint bank accounts. As my wife suffers from dementia I now find it necessary to invoke the power of attorney. Also, I wanted to reduce our current accounts from two to one. (More difficult than I first thought). The bank, Barclays were excellent. We were there for over 1 hour and all necessary bits were done with good advise. All direct debits were transferred to one account, but I have to deal with the income payments with the pension bodies directly. My teachers pension was dead easy on line. But my wife’s old age pension with the dwp is proving really difficult.

Now the odd bit. Today I received 3 letters from the bank. 1 had a cheque book for the account we are keeping, the other two had cheque books for the account we are closing.

We have not written a cheque for over 15 years I think!

Regarding the dwp. What a waste of time. 3 1 hour plus phone calls just to get through. I then spoke to someone who insisted that I quote the digital Power of Attorney code. He would not accept that ours are paper based. Told me to get them digitised with the Office of the Public Guardian. I told him that that was in progress and estimated may take 10 years. Eventually he said he would send an official to the house to look at it. But I have heard nothing.

Not at all helpful.

It should also be noted that in the case of our surgery. Invoking the health Power of Attorney has been very difficult. They have no systems for dealing with it. Very worrying.

John

 

[otherclive]

We are just tidying up our joint bank accounts. As my wife suffers from dementia I now find it necessary to invoke the power of attorney. Also, I wanted to reduce our current accounts from two to one. (More difficult than I first thought). The bank, Barclays were excellent. We were there for over 1 hour and all necessary bits were done with good advise. All direct debits were transferred to one account, but I have to deal with the income payments with the pension bodies directly. My teachers pension was dead easy on line. But my wife’s old age pension with the dwp is proving really difficult.

Now the odd bit. Today I received 3 letters from the bank. 1 had a cheque book for the account we are keeping, the other two had cheque books for the account we are closing.

We have not written a cheque for over 15 years I think!

Regarding the dwp. What a waste of time. 3 1 hour plus phone calls just to get through. I then spoke to someone who insisted that I quote the digital Power of Attorney code. He would not accept that ours are paper based. Told me to get them digitised with the Office of the Public Guardian. I told him that that was in progress and estimated may take 10 years. Eventually he said he would send an official to the house to look at it. But I have heard nothing.

Not at all helpful.

It should also be noted that in the case of our surgery. Invoking the health Power of Attorney has been very difficult. They have no systems for dealing with it. Very worrying.

John

I had LPOA for my father, and for the last three years for my BIL. My advise to anyone is take them out early for relatives or yourself. When the need to use them arise I couldn’t believe how differently organisations dealt with them. My father’s bank, Santander, were a nightmare. DWP for my father would not accept the digitised reference codes, so I had to go into our local DSS office who kindly took a photocopy, endorsed it and arranged to send it to DWP. Most finance and investment companies required a full copy of the LPOA, which undermines the OPG efforts to encourage use of discrete digital authorisation. For my BIL I simplified everything by ending several banks accounts and focussing it in to one, where we manage his monthly fees and outgoings. So far other than registering with HMRC I’ve not had to deal with them as his tax affairs run smoothly.

Once it’s all up and running a LPOA really does help but it’s not necessarily plain sailing to get to that position.

 

[Jcloughie]

I had LPOA for my father, and for the last three years for my BIL. My advise to anyone is take them out early for relatives or yourself. When the need to use them arise I couldn’t believe how differently organisations dealt with them. My father’s bank, Santander, were a nightmare. DWP for my father would not accept the digitised reference codes, so I had to go into our local DSS office who kindly took a photocopy, endorsed it and arranged to send it to DWP. Most finance and investment companies required a full copy of the LPOA, which undermines the OPG efforts to encourage use of discrete digital authorisation. For my BIL I simplified everything by ending several banks accounts and focussing it in to one, where we manage his monthly fees and outgoings. So far other than registering with HMRC I’ve not had to deal with them as his tax affairs run smoothly.

Once it’s all up and running a LPOA really does help but it’s not necessarily plain sailing to get to that position.

Thank you, that’s very useful information.

John

 

[DeauxChevaux]

Thank you for writing this thread, it helps me (maybe and others) plan for LPA and its issues