What a lasting power of attorney actually lets someone do

A lasting power of attorney, usually called an LPA, lets you choose — while you are still able to make that choice — who would act for you if you ever could not act for yourself. It is often described loosely as “giving someone power over your affairs,” which makes it sound broader and less controlled than it actually is. An attorney’s authority is real, but it is bounded in specific ways worth understanding before you rely on it, or before you agree to be one.

The two types

There are two lasting powers of attorney, made as separate documents, each covering a different part of life.

• Property and financial affairs. Covers bank accounts, bills, benefits and property. With your permission recorded in the document, your attorney can use this one while you still have mental capacity, as well as after you lose it — useful, for example, if illness or injury makes it hard for you to get to the bank yourself even though your judgement is unaffected.
• Health and welfare. Covers decisions about your daily care and medical treatment, including, if you choose to allow it, decisions about life-sustaining treatment. This one works differently: it can only be used once you have actually lost the mental capacity to make the decision in question yourself, never before, whatever the document itself says.

Most people make both at the same time, because the two situations they cover — being unable to manage money, and being unable to make care decisions — often arise together. Either can also be made on its own.

The duty that limits an attorney

The authority an LPA grants is not a blank cheque. An attorney is legally required to act in the best interests of the person who appointed them, not their own, and that duty runs through everything else the role involves.

• An attorney must keep the donor’s money and property completely separate from their own.
• An attorney must consider the donor’s own wishes and values, past and present, so far as they can be known, rather than simply what the attorney thinks is sensible.
• An attorney can only do what the document itself gives them authority to do — it does not create a general power to manage the donor’s life beyond what is written down.
• An attorney cannot make a will for the donor, or change a will the donor has already made, whatever the financial LPA appears to permit.

Anyone concerned that an attorney is not acting in the donor’s best interests can raise it with the Office of the Public Guardian, which has power to investigate and, in serious cases, to apply to have the attorney removed.

Choosing attorneys

You can appoint more than one attorney, and decide whether they must act together on every decision or are each able to act alone — a choice worth thinking through deliberately, since requiring joint action gives more protection against a single attorney acting badly, but can make ordinary transactions slower if the attorneys live apart or do not agree easily. You can also name replacement attorneys, who step in only if your first choice can no longer act, so a single attorney becoming unable or unwilling to continue does not leave the LPA without anyone to use it.

While you still have capacity, you remain free to remove or replace an attorney yourself at any time, for any reason, without needing to justify the decision to anyone. Once capacity is lost, removing an attorney is no longer something you can do directly — it typically needs an application to the Court of Protection instead, which is slower and more involved than a change you could have made yourself while you still could.

Why the timing matters

An LPA can only be made while the person making it has the mental capacity to understand what they are signing. That is the single fact that makes early planning worth doing: once capacity is lost, it is too late to make one. There is no way to backdate the decision or have a family member sign on the person’s behalf.

The only remaining route at that point is an application to the Court of Protection for someone to be appointed as a deputy — a court-supervised alternative that takes longer to put in place, involves ongoing supervision by the court once granted, and gives the family far less say over who is chosen than making an LPA in advance would have given the person themselves.

Registration

An LPA has no legal effect at all until it is registered with the Office of the Public Guardian — signing it is not enough on its own.

Registration currently takes around 14 to 20 weeks, including a statutory waiting period built into the process, as at September 2026. Because of that timescale, most people register an LPA as soon as it is signed rather than waiting until it might be needed — an unregistered LPA is no use in an emergency, precisely when it tends to be needed most urgently.

This article is general information about the law of England and Wales, not advice on your own circumstances.