What happens in Britain if someone doesn't have a durable power of attorney to hand over their finances to a trusted relative in the event of disability.
A secret court is seizing the assets of thousands of elderly and mentally impaired people and turning control of their lives over to the State - against the wishes of their relatives. The draconian measures are being imposed by the little-known Court of Protection, set up two years ago to act in the interests of people suffering from Alzheimer's or other mental incapacity.
The court hears about 23,000 cases a year - always in private - involving people deemed unable to take their own decisions. Using far-reaching powers, the court has so far taken control of more than £3.2billion of assets.
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But the system elicited an extraordinary 3,000 complaints in its first 18 months of operation. Among them were allegations that officials failed to consult relatives, imposed huge fees and even 'raided' elderly people's homes searching for documents.
Carers trying to cope with a mentally impaired loved one, forced to apply for a court order to access money, said they felt the system put them under suspicion as it assumed at the outset that they were out to defraud their relatives.
The level of intrusiveness is unbelievable. Richard Fernandez writes in Outlaw
Leaving decisions to individuals makes it unlikely that they will all get it right but it equally implies they almost never get it all wrong. Society based on individual choices has a diversified portfolio of outcomes. In contrast if a government gets it wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong.
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This anonymous bureaucracy was set up to protect the elderly from their relatives. There are almost certainly a considerable number of no-good, low-down and grasping relatives who are raiding their impaired parent’s estate. But there were also a great many relatives who acted honorably and even self-sacrificially to care for their aging relatives as well as possible. As the article notes that “opposition politicians said the system, set up by Justice Secretary Jack Straw, needed to be overhauled to take account of the fact that most people were ‘honourable and decent’ and had their loved ones’ best interests at heart.” By creating a bureaucracy to handle what was formerly a family affair the UK did away with variance and replaced it with standardized, soulless and allegedly shabby treatment. The progressives spread the good news that we’re all going to eat the same dinners. The bad news is that it may uniformly be gruel.
If this isn't a spur to estate planning, nothing is.