External Power of Attorney

A Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) enables someone who’s still mentally capable to decide who can deal with their personal affairs after they become incapable of acting and making decisions for themselves. The LPA may be effective immediately after registration with the Office of the Public Guardian unless restrictions are specified.

We’ll need a Property and Financial Affairs LPA to allow attorneys to manage your account. This must be registered with the Office of Public Guardian (OPG).

Once we receive this, we’ll send it back to you and you can begin to manage the account.

A General Power of Attorney enables someone to deal with all your financial affairs or only certain matters. A solicitor or experienced adviser will be able to grant you this.

If a person loses mental capacity, however, then a General Power of Attorney isn’t valid. Under these circumstances, it may be more appropriate to use a Lasting Power of Attorney or apply for a Court of Protection order.

Once a person has lost their mental capacity, it’s no longer possible to create a Power of Attorney.

Representatives will need to apply to the Court of Protection for a decision to be made on their affairs. However, if there’s a continuing need to make decisions on the person’s behalf, the representatives can ask the Court of Protection to appoint a deputy.

Once we receive the Court of Protection, we’ll:

• Update the address on all accounts held by the donor
• No longer allow online dealing so that we can make sure the customer isn’t making unwise investment decisions. This means that the attorney won’t be able to do any online dealing either, but they will be able to do so over the phone.

If the account-holder wants to keep decision-making, it’s up to the deputy to specify the circumstances under which the customer may do so, and it’s the deputy's responsibility to make these exceptions or restrictions known to the customer.

If we receive any dealing instructions directly from the customer, we’ll seek confirmation from the deputy.

• Provide dealing instructions on your account, such as switching, adding money, and selling investments.
• Discuss your accounts with us
• Request copies of reporting documents, such as Statement & Valuations or Tax Vouchers
• Provide online access to your account with your permission to use login details. This is at your discretion and isn’t something we recommend ( see online security). In the event of suspicious or fraudulent online activity on your account, there’s a risk we may not be able to determine the cause if both your Power of Attorney and yourself have been accessing the account online using shared details

We can’t accept an ISA application signed by a prospective client’s attorney unless it’s submitted with either:

• An LPA which has been registered with the Office of the Public Guardian, and which doesn’t place any restriction on the attorney in regard to making the decision to open an ISA
• An original sealed Court of Protection order
• Where the applicant is physically incapable of signing the form, we may accept an application under a General Power of Attorney (provided the applicant has the required mental capacity). In such circumstances we would require a confirmation that the applicant is physically incapable of signing the required documents.