Roles and Responsibilities: Who is who and who does what?

Feedback from customers has confirmed what we already suspected: the names of some of these roles can be confusing and it’s not immediately who is who (and who does what) in the process of creating a LPA for either financial or health and wellbeing.

We’ll break it down below to try and make it clear who’s who in the process:

• The ‘Donor’: this is the person the LPA is being created for, i.e. you. So called because you will be legally donating your power to someone to make decisions on your behalf.

• The ‘Attorney’: this is the person (or perhaps multiple persons) who receive that power and who will potentially make decisions relating to your finances/health and welfare, should they be required to.

• The ‘Certificate Provider’: this is a person who’s signing the LPA forms and confirming that the donor understands what they are signing/doing and that the donor has not been pressurised into signing. This person must have known the donor personally for at least two years and importantly the certificate provider cannot also be an attorney.

• The ‘Witness’: a person who is physically present at the time of signature and who can witness the signatures of the donor and the attorney/attorneys. NB: The witness is not required to witness the certificate provider.

• Finally we have the ‘Applicant’: this is the person who is applying for the LPA. This can be either the donor or the attorney(s), but not both.

Hopefully this makes the process more understandable. We’ll cover off the mechanics of getting the LPA forms signed in another blog post.