A lasting power of attorney and a Court of Protection deputyship both let someone else manage your affairs after you lose capacity, but they are not alternatives you choose between at the same moment. One is arranged in advance while you are well; the other is forced on your family once it is too late for the first. The gap between them, in cost, time and control, is large.
A lasting power of attorney and a Court of Protection deputyship answer the same question: who deals with your money, property and care if you can no longer decide for yourself. The important thing to understand is that they are not two options a London family weighs up side by side. An LPA is the arrangement you put in place while you still have mental capacity. Deputyship is what is left when nobody did, and capacity has already gone. This is the practical difference between setting up an LPA while you are well and leaving your relatives to apply to court after the fact.
The timing is the whole distinction
A lasting power of attorney can only be made by someone who understands what they are signing. If capacity has been lost, through advanced dementia, a severe stroke or a serious brain injury, it is already too late to create one. The door to the cheaper, faster route has closed. That single fact is why the choice is never really made at the point of crisis. It was made, or not made, years earlier.
Where no valid LPA exists and someone can no longer manage their own affairs, their family cannot simply step in. A spouse has no automatic right to operate the other's sole accounts, and an adult child has none over a parent's. The only lawful way to gain that authority is to apply to the Court of Protection to be appointed as a deputy. Deputyship, in other words, is the fallback the law provides precisely because an LPA was not set up in time.
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What a lasting power of attorney does
An LPA lets you choose, in advance, the people you trust to act for you, and to set out how you want them to act. There are two documents: one for property and financial affairs, and one for health and welfare. Each is registered with the Office of the Public Guardian before it can be used. Because you appoint your own attorneys and can add conditions and preferences, an LPA keeps control in your hands even as it hands day-to-day authority to someone else.
The legal foundation for both LPAs and deputyship is the same, the framework set out in the Mental Capacity Act 2005, which governs how decisions are made for people who lack capacity and how attorneys and deputies must behave. Where the two routes diverge is not the underlying law but who does the choosing. With an LPA, you choose. With deputyship, a judge does, guided by what is in your best interests but without your own instructions to follow.
What deputyship involves
A deputyship application asks the Court of Protection to appoint a named person, usually a close relative, to manage the affairs of someone who has already lost capacity. Most deputyships are for property and financial affairs; the court grants personal welfare deputyships far more sparingly. The applicant has to file evidence, including a formal assessment of the person's capacity by a doctor or other suitable professional, and the court then decides whether to make an order and on what terms.
A deputy is supervised in a way an attorney is not. The Office of the Public Guardian oversees deputies, who normally have to submit an annual report of the decisions they have made and the money they have handled, and many are required to take out a security bond, a form of insurance that protects the person's estate if the deputy acts improperly. This ongoing scrutiny reflects that the deputy was not personally chosen by the person whose affairs they now run.
Comparing the cost
The cost gap is the reason so many families wish they had acted sooner. Registering an LPA with the Office of the Public Guardian currently costs £92 per document, with fee reductions or exemptions for people on qualifying benefits or low incomes. On top of that, professional preparation of an LPA in London typically runs to a few hundred pounds per document, and having both types drawn up together often attracts a reduced combined fee. Broadly, setting up both LPAs is a low-hundreds-to-around-a-thousand-pound exercise done once.
Deputyship is materially more expensive and, unlike an LPA, it keeps costing. The court application fee is £421, with a further £100 assessment fee for a new deputy and a possible hearing fee if the court needs one. There is then annual supervision, generally £320 a year, reduced to £35 where a property and affairs deputy manages a smaller estate, plus the cost of any security bond and, in most cases, professional fees for preparing the application. Neutral background on the costs of becoming a deputy is set out by the government-backed MoneyHelper service, and the figures throughout should be read as indicative because they are reviewed periodically. The headline point holds regardless of the exact numbers: a one-off LPA is far cheaper than a court appointment that carries yearly charges for as long as it lasts.
Comparing the time
Time is the other cost, and it is often the harder one for families. An LPA registration currently takes in the region of eight to ten weeks where the application is completed correctly, and it can be set up quietly, long before it is ever needed. Because it is arranged in advance, the delay is invisible: by the time capacity is lost, the registered document is already sitting ready.
Deputyship happens after the crisis, when decisions cannot wait, and it is slow. Straightforward applications commonly take around four to six months from start to order, and longer if the papers are complex or anyone objects. During that wait, bills still fall due and care still has to be arranged, but nobody yet holds the legal authority to deal with the person's bank or property. That interval, when the money is frozen and the family is powerless, is the single strongest argument for putting an LPA in place while there is still time.
How the two fit into wider planning
An LPA sits alongside, not instead of, a will. A will decides what happens to your estate after death; an LPA covers the years before, when you may be alive but unable to manage your own affairs. Many London families deal with both in one conversation, which is why the case for pairing an LPA with a will comes up so often. It closes the gap on both sides of the final years rather than only one.
Cost is a common reason people hesitate over an LPA, yet the sums involved are modest set against the deputyship bill that replaces them if they wait too long. Anyone weighing the outlay can model the likely fees for their own situation with our LPA cost estimator before deciding, and treat the figures throughout this guide as a guide rather than a quote, since court and registration fees change over time.
We are a matching service and do not draft LPAs or act as attorneys or deputies ourselves. We connect London families with vetted specialists through our lasting power of attorney service, who can prepare and register both types of LPA correctly and explain how they work with your will. Capacity, court procedure and best-interests decisions are technical areas, so anyone unsure of their position should take advice from a qualified professional rather than assuming a relative can simply take over.
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