A waste of space.
Jean Beaumont had lost her husband, and her health. She was gradually losing her mental faculties. At 81, the world was changing round her in ways she coud no longer comprehend.
She was grateful when the young couple next door took an interest in her and started to sort out some of her affairs. So grateful that she decided to leave them some money. Quite a lot of money in fact, most of her substantial savings.
Ah, the impatience of youth. Mark Boyd Smith and Michelle Cooper couldn’t wait until Jean died and they received their bequest.
They set about stripping her assets from around her as she sat, lonely and frail, in her terraced home in Bradford.
They helped themselves to £30,000 of foreign holidays in Amsterdam and Spain, hired cars, bought clothes and expensive jewellery. Jean was oblivious to all this.
Two years after these thefts commenced, Bradford Social Services received an anonymous phone call alerting them to the impoverished and malnourished state of Jean Beaumont and her home.
Remember that salient fact – an anonymous phone call.
Social Services took her into care in a residential home. They had no idea of the involvement of Boyd Smith and Cooper.
On Friday, Judge Benson jailed the pair of them for five years for the theft of Jean Beaumont’s possessions.
“The courts must protect vulnerable people, particularly the elderly, from the ravages of dishonest people like you,” Judge Benson said.
Quite, quite, Judge Benson. They must indeed. That is what the Court of Protection is supposed to do. It didn’t.
Remember the anonymous phone call? It took Social Services to Jean’s door. When they took her into care, their next port of call was to the Court of Protection to get permission to sell her house to pay for her care.
They couldn’t get permission! Why not? Because the Court of Protection had already granted permission to two other individuals to look after Jean Beaumont’s financial affairs.
The two unsavoury drug dealers who lived nearby – name of Mark Boyd Smith and Michelle Cooper.
Jean had been under the tender care of the Court of Protection all the time; they had supervised as a new will was made leaving everything to her friendly local drug dealers, they had supervised the pair as they stripped her accounts – they had noticed nothing wrong…..not so much as raised an eyebrow.
It took a concerned neighbour to realise that she was by now physically in danger, and it was only when another state department applied for permission to rob her bank accounts and found they had been beaten to it that anybody thought anything was amiss. Social Services called the police in to investigate.
The Court of Protection is an utterly useless organisation which succeeds only to pay for itself out of the fees it extracts from the frail and feeble supposedly under its care.
Jean Beaumont would have been a lot better off – literally – if the Court of Protection had never existed. At least no one would have been given a licence to strip her assets. You might think that they will now do something about retrieving what little money they can from this larcenous pair – but they won’t. It’s not in their remit you see. They will tell you that Jean was ‘exercising her autonomy’ under Human Rights legislation……
Every week, Tom Harris complains about the ‘incompetent and useless’ IPSA civil servants who are making it so difficult for him to access tax payers money by way of expenses. Not once have I heard him, or any other Labour ‘protector of the poor and vulnerable’ politician, or Con-Dem for that matter, utter a single word of condemnation regarding the scandal of the incompetent and useless Court of Protection.
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September 22, 2010 at 08:05 -
Terrific article
Don’t have much direct experience of COP as such – I shall be keeping an eye out!
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September 22, 2010 at 08:42 -
The ease with which that poor lady was conned, robbed and neglected doesn’t surprise me in the least. My wife applied for Lasting Power of Attorney for her Mum last year (after I passed your advice to her). We found the forms confusing and illogical to the point where it would be easy for unscrupulous types to abuse. We involved people who care for Mum’s welfare of course, but I’m sure we could have slipped any Tom, Dick or Harry a few quid to be “Attorneys”, “Certificate Providers” or “People to be Told”. A ridiculous system which seems to have been conceived by idiots, administered by fools and policed by vultures. I agree, the COP is not fit for purpose and should be scrapped.
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September 22, 2010 at 08:50 -
The only thing I would ever say in favour of the Lasting Power of Attorney is that it is marginally preferable to having a full Court of Protection order – but that is not saying much. At least your family get to rip you off instead of some solicitor in Salford East that you have never heard of……
As you quite rightly point out – there is as little care taken over registering as LPA as there is over monitoring one – jsut rubber stamping bits of paper.
I have always said that the Court of Protection works perfectly for those who don’t need it – the honest law abiding families, – it is as much use as a chocolate soldier in the face of even a casual attempt to take advantage of the vulnerable.-
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September 22, 2010 at 09:56 -
My old Law Professor explained why legal documents were drafted very precisely and covered every imaginable eventuality. “You do not need the protection of the Law when the sun is shining, but a leaky roof is useless when it rains.” In this tick-box world I would have expected a risk analysis of the vulnerable person and the people “protecting” her. Doubtless “lessons will be learned by all stakeholders” from this sorry case. In other words it will become more difficult and awkward for honest people to use the system. At most, senior heads will take early enhanced retirement.
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September 22, 2010 at 09:33 -
Words fail me…
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September 22, 2010 at 11:18 -
Despicable beyond belief – both the direct perpetrators and the government enablers.
Even dispensing summary justice with my own bare hands wouldn’t seem sufficient.
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September 22, 2010 at 13:01 -
Having tried to register an enduring power of attorney earlier this year I am not surprised. They lost the papers! I had a phone call from them saying they were irrevocably lost the same day that the approved documents arrived in the post.
The registration forms are, as Maturecheddars says, totally illogical.
The process is worse than stupid. I had to send a letter to my mother, living next door, to advise her that we were implementing the EPOA. If mum could have understood the letter we would not have had to send it. As far as I can see that letter was her only protection.
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September 22, 2010 at 13:35 -
Also not in the Public Guardian’s mandate is verifying the information submitted on the application for deputyship form. This includes the part where the applicant says that he/she has contacted relatives. It is left up to the applicant to contact relatives and advise them that he/she has applied for power of attorney. The courts should be doing this, not the applicant. As a result, it doesn’t get done and the courts “have no remit” to verify this information either. Any Tom, Dick, or Harry can “get away” with your assets. The court doesn’t check anything. It just wants you in the system without any contentious litigation from objecting relatives.
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September 22, 2010 at 16:48 -
I wonder how often this scam is now being worked?
Michelle Cooper doesn’t look like the brains of Britain to me so somebody has shown her how to apply through the CoP, and how pitifully easy it is to present oneself as the guardian. I will bet you it is going on in a reasonably organized fashion, identifying elderly property holders and ‘befriending’ them when it is established the relatives know little or care less about them.
The Telegraph and Argus, which covered the story, wrote an inadequate leader column which clearly doesn’t have a clue (as I didn’t until Anna started writing) how pitifully easy it is to get the state to connive with stripping the wealth of the old, and that the state only gets nasty when it hasn’t got its share.
The T&A thinks it is somehow the banks’ fault, as if old people aren’t allowed to spend their own money.
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September 22, 2010 at 17:20 -
Interesting that the banks get the blame here – the usual complaint is that banks are remarkably awkward when it comes to complying with a valid power of attorney.
If, If, I was aware that you were going to go to say India, for a year, WOAR, and say I was renting your house from you, I could register an enduring power of attorney for you. As ‘Attorney’ I could arrange for the notification to be sent to ‘you’ – at your house – where you would not be, only ‘I’ would be. I could arrange for the notification to ‘relatives’ to be sent to those relatives which I nominated at an address which I nominated. No attempt would be made to even check that the signature on the LPA was the same signature that your bank held for you. In fact the CoP wouldn’t even contact your bank – that would be up to me to do as ‘attorney’ armed with ‘your’ registered LPA. I could take the LPA to the post offfice and have all mail forwarded to me at an address which I nominated – and which the post office would refuse to tell anyone!
I could have your house sold and the money in another bank long before you came back from your year abroad. It has been done – and didn’t result in further checks being installed. Only if a complaint is made – and who would complain? – would the CoP languidly write to me as ‘attorney’ and ask me to furnish accounts! And only ‘if’ I failed to furnish accounts to satisfy them, would any further action be taken by their fraud investigation unit – and that is a new innovation of the last couple of years. Nor is it an innovation that would result in you getting any money back – that is not part of the remit.
That is why I keep banging onto people to make sure they do have a genuine LPA correctly lodged with someone responsible – the CoP is like a bloody collander.
I regret to say that I am now aware of an elderly woman who is being stripped of assets by a daughter who took my advice to take out an EPA (forerunner of the LPA) and I am now in the invidious position of having to either interfere in private family business of which I should not be aware, or grassing the lot of them up to the CoP which will have repercussions on the divorce hearing of people who are actually the innocent party. Solomon’s judgement either way.
I blow a gasket every time I see Tom Harris going on about IPSA!
Had Scoail Services not tried to gain control of Jean’s bank account to sell her house, this would never have come to light.-
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September 22, 2010 at 22:14 -
Ouch. King Lear innit? Although I’m of the opinion that his knights would have robbed him if Regan and Gonerill hadn’t.
Time for the bards round here to re-cast the play with the fool replaced by a wise-cracking lawyer. Give Gildas something to do and show that Geoffrey of Monmouth the way to go home on character-based fiction in which we promise that any resemblance characters may bear to persons living is purely coincidental.
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September 22, 2010 at 13:47 -
Or people like Mark Boyd Smith and Michelle Cooper could be publicly flogged as a punishment and an example to others. I’d do it but I’d want to wear the Guy Fawkes mask from V for vendendetta.
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September 22, 2010 at 21:54 -
…’The Court of Protection is an utterly useless organisation which succeeds only to pay for itself out of the fees it extracts from the frail and feeble supposedly under its care.’…
A bit like a Government.
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September 23, 2010 at 08:35 -
Hi Anna
Thanks for that – we are trying to raise awareness of the need to write LPAs early whilst you still have full capacity, and are able to make an informed choice. I have drawn attention to it on my site.
It is also possible to build in a “audit” facility so that your attorneys have to account to us or to (say) the SWW Trust Corporation once a year, so if too much is disappearing from bank accounts it will be spotted. But much better to chose the right attorneys – though this is sadly not always possible.I could go on!
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September 23, 2010 at 13:30 -
Oh for a latter-day Wat Tyler/Jack Cade/Guy Fawkes!
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September 23, 2010 at 20:08 -
What is needed is to simplify the wildly overcomplicated process of creating Lasting Powers of Attorney – again.
Believe it or not, the actual documents have already been cut in HALF – and they are still 75% longer than they should be.
And as for the registration process…
Read all about in on my blog (with a new heading “The Campaign for sensible LPAs!”
http://www.lastingpowerofattorneyfinance.co.uk/?p=41 – maybe you have some more ideas we could present to the OPG and Court of Protection?Steve
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