I ask this question because there is a maxim that says “a nation is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens”.  This is from US President Hubert H. Humphrey and the full quote is:

“The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

I would go further and say that Government has no mandate to interfere in the lives of any citizen beyond those who cannot help themselves, or should not be helping themselves.  In matters of defence of the realm, that includes all of us. Equally true when it comes to punitive sanctions. Any other interference in our lives needs to be judged against the yardstick of whether it is a necessary evil introduced by the necessity of helping those who cannot help themselves.

Yesterday I wrote (at length, my apologies) of my abiding interest in the hidden world of the Court of Protection. Inevitably, I attracted a commentator who jumped to its defence and told me that his experience of it ‘has been professional – if a little slow at answering the telephone’. He was of course a relative of someone whose affairs the Court was handling. I might have been impressed by this statement of support if he had told me that he was a ‘patient’ whose affairs were being handled by the court, or even better, a dishonest relative with evidence that the court had not only uncovered that dishonestly, but had taken steps which had restored the ‘patient’ under their care to the position they were in before they were ripped off.

You can liken the Court to a Smoke Alarm, with attached Fire Insurance.

Being impressed with the ease with which you can buy a Smoke Alarm is meaningless, ditto eulogising over the packaging and simple method of attaching it to the ceiling. If your Smoke Alarm doesn’t sound off loud and clear long before the flames lick round your bed, if its sole response to the billowing smoke is to dryly record ‘ Smoke Noted’ for the benefit of those who find your charred body, then the entire apparatus has no discernable meaning. It is a lump of molten plastic that has cost you dear. Worse, if the legislature has ensured that by law you must buy said Smoke Alarm for £800 each year, all it actually represents is a tax on citizens who fall within its aegis.

The sole criteria by which the Court of Protection can be judged is its response to being aware that fraud is indicated. If it can’t do that it has no moral right to be doing anything. Taking £23 million pounds of tax payers money every year cannot be justified by the speed with which it answers phone calls from honest men and women.

Unfortunately, those are the sort of meaningless criteria by which the National Audit Office does judge the Court – and it still regularly finds it lacking!

Yesterday I gave you two of the many hundreds of examples indelibly burnt into my memory of the complacency the Court displays when informed of fraud. You would get fed up long before I did, if I were to list them all. I cannot forget, they are real people, not ‘patients’, not ‘statistics’, real people with names and faces and stories and tears, forever in my memory.

Roger Dodger asked ‘what reforms would be necessary to make the Court fit for purpose’.  A good question.

Accountability would be my first answer.

There are but three ways in which the Court can be made aware of fraud, its raison d’être. Either someone is silly enough to file annual accounts showing that they purchased a Ferrari with the money earmarked for their Mother’s care home fees – it does happen, some are that daft – or an ‘interested party’ writes in to the court telling of their concerns, or one of the pathetically few Lord Chancellor’s Visitors happens to have a fraudulent case amongst the 25% (and that is a huge improvement on the 1 in 36 cases that used to be ‘inspected’) of cases that are visited and files a report saying so.

Those annual accounts, the sad little letters carefully written on newly purchased lined writing paper from the ‘concerned relative’, and the Lord Chancellor’s Visitors reports, all land up on the desk of the Case Officer, a civil servant. One of the 500 employed by the Office of the Public Guardian. Even if every single one of them were solely employed in handling cases, not being Union Representatives, or making the tea, or dusting the shelves in the archive room, they would still have some 46 bulging case files on their desk, and of course it is far more than that. It used to be 400 cases per active case officer. It used to be virtually impossible to see across the open plan rooms with every desk surrounded by a towering pile of dusty files.

In between speedily answering the phone to impressed Deputies like Richard, the case officers have a mountain of other duties. They are buying and selling houses for ‘patients’, they are sadly arranging divorces for some, they are arranging child support for the offspring of others, they are supervising the rewriting of wills for still more;  unless they resist the temptation to write ‘noted’ on the report that will satisfy the National Audit Office that the entire edifice has been inspected and supervised, unless they take the time to read that letter and walk down the corridor, sorry, make that travel from Birmingham to London now that they have been ‘outsourced’ to Birmingham, and notify the Court of Protection that there is a problem and which solution would the court like to apply, then the court will be none the wiser. They are not telepathic.

Assuming that we do have such an energetic and dedicated case officer, and there are some, then what will be the Court’s response?  Generally it will be to change the Deputy to one of the Professional Deputies that the court has expressed a preference for – no wonder, they understand the system and don’t overload it with queries regarding whether they are in any danger of getting a reply to their letter soon.

Each Deputy has to lodge a ‘fidelity bond’ – used to be for £5,000. The Court can ‘call’ that Bond in. That has put £5,000 back in the patients account. Pretty meaningless when the patient has been ripped off for many tens of thousands of pounds. It would make far more sense to have something along the lines of the ‘pool’ operated by the Motor Insurers, which could actually take all those payments for bonds and use them to make true restitution to those whom the system has failed.

Very occasionally, the Court does take criminal action against a Deputy. Google and you will come across the handful of cases, you will also come across the equal handful of cases where the Court has instigated criminal action against the civil servants who discovered that if you have the responsibility to pay bills for someone, it is just as easy to pop the odd bill for a roof repair printed up on your bother-in-laws computer into the dusty piles. Who is going to know whether that roof was actually repaired or not? Sad, but true.

The system relies too heavily on the innate honesty of most people. Changing the Deputy only serves to (hopefully) prevent further fraud in the future. Given that the Court itself believes there is in excess of 10% of fraud just within one area, I would suggest that the entire operation be disbanded.

Let concerned citizens and relatives write to their local Police Station if they believe fraud is being perpetuated.

Let the banking system take over payment of bills for citizens who have money but are not able to remember to write their own cheques.

What we have at the moment is a system that encourages people to believe that there is such a thing as ‘protection of the vulnerable’ – it taxes the honest citizen and cannot even compensate by fulfilling its core fuction which is to protect the vulnerable.

Anna Raccoon

M W Tiley November 4, 2009 at 01:33

Dear Kate

The OPG did move to Birmingham this year from Archway London.

The mental copacity act 2005 is sound and protects the vunrable.

The old act 1985 did leave the vunrable open to fraud crime.
Attorneys
arranging divorces or buy and sell properties grabing life savings and making
new wills to cover there fraud. Costing the British TAX payer Millions or
Billians a year? all unregulated
using unregisterd EPA’S. I will Quot
Master D Lush in 1998 5 to 10%
of unregisterd EPA’s the doners suffer
financhal abuce.

Now it wont happen with the new act 2005 there are 83 pages I stick to the
5 kee princibals page one if you do that you wont go worong and don’t forget
44 of the act.

There is no redress for E L Briggs locked in a legle twilite zone by the
court of pritection.
ps Sorry for spelling I am disflecik.

KateCorday November 3, 2009 at 00:42

Your information is in most cases inaccurate or between 5 and 10 years out
of date. The OPG doesn’t have “case officers” – hasn’t for years. They
certainly don’t arrange divorces or buy and sell properties. They register
LPAs and supervise deputies. That’s more or less it. And their office in
Birmingham isn’t outsourced, it’s staffed by full-time civil servants.

Check your facts before you rant.

Jabba the Cat October 28, 2009 at 09:43

Humphrey was only a VP.

john
ward October 28, 2009 at 09:40

Damn. Pedant got there before me. Poor old HH got to Veep and no higher,
after which in their wisdom the American people voted for that fine man,
Richard Nixon.
Rodger Dodger’s at it again, too: what’s more, he’s right –
it should be 24/2. Personally, I’m at the keyboard 24/0; any physicists
looking in will know that 24/0 = infinity. Mainly I find my efforts produce
inanity, which is like infinity but slightly more amusing.
When can we get
back to Peter Hain’s unfeasibly large plates?
Yesterday Man

pedant2007 October 28, 2009 at 00:45

Humphrey the President? Not what I remember.

M W Tiley October 27, 2009 at 21:11

I can say from personal experance the court of protection don’t work. They
do harber and protect villans the fraud act 2006.
E L Briggs the victim has
been leagley robed under the court of protection nose.
The then master
Denzel Lush granted a order to register EPA dated August 21 2006 having quoted
and seeing fraud by the Attorneys using a unregisterd power there were EPA’S
made in 3 years the last one granted by D Lush.
I have mailed the
scolictors that sold his home they say they acted in acordance with a EPA well
that was

RogerDodger October 27, 2009 at 19:55

“I know you

Gloria Smudd
October 27, 2009 at 18:09

If your Smoke Alarm doesn

john
ward October 27, 2009 at 14:27

‘Let concerned citizens and relatives write to their local Police Station
if they believe fraud is being perpetuated’
I know you’ve been at it 24/7
for the last 48 Anna, but I had to have a giggle at this one. My copshop was
closed from Oct 7 -19th last ‘for renovation’. Now it’s working a 3-day week
from 8 til 4. Next week it’s on two days ‘because the reception sergeant is on
annual leave’. Like your Court bloke and his bloody phone-answering target,
it’s a metaphor for how Britain works (or rather doesn’t work) nowadays.
As
for ringing the station, the answerphone darn our nick is still using Sgt
Phillips voice; he left to become plain clothes a month ago. There is an 0845
number to ring. They never call back. There is a police website to go to, but
your email to it goes into a black hole – as it does at the PCC and the Chief
Constable’s site – a chap who you can’t email at all, but he reassuringly has
a First in cultural diversity. Given the immigrant/non-Caucasian population of
our area is under 1%, we’re all greatly reassured by that: but we’d prefer a
less diverse crime wave to go with it.
It is all Gestures as Usual…the main
gesture being two fingers up to all of us.
Great piece again,
however.
Now about Peter Hain’s feet…..
Yesterday Man x