# How common is lasting power of attorney fraud? What the Office of the Public Guardian's figures show

OPG had 13,183 concerns about attorneys and deputies in 2025-26, against 10.6m powers on its register. What that shows, and what the 2023 Act changes.

**In short:** The OPG does not count LPA fraud separately. In 2025-26 the Office of the Public Guardian received 13,183 concerns about attorneys and deputies and opened 3,645 investigations, against 10.6 million powers of attorney on its register.

The Office of the Public Guardian (OPG) does not publish a count of lasting power of attorney fraud. It registers every LPA in England and Wales and investigates attorneys who may be abusing them, and it reports concerns raised, investigations opened and what happened at the end. It does not say how many of those cases involved a forged signature or an attorney quietly spending someone else's savings.

What the OPG's figures do allow is a sense of scale. In 2025-26 it received 13,183 concerns about attorneys and court-appointed deputies, opened 3,645 investigations, and had 10,620,245 lasting and enduring powers of attorney on its register. Measured against the register, the concerns that reach the OPG are few. Measured against the OPG's capacity to deal with them, they are rising faster than the service has been able to keep pace.

## The numbers for 2025-26

The OPG's annual report and accounts for 2025-26, laid before Parliament on 15 July 2026, covers the year to 31 March 2026. Concerns raised rose 17 per cent, from 11,266 in 2024-25 to 13,183. Of those, 9,538 (72 per cent) were signposted to other services and 3,645 (28 per cent) were accepted into investigations, slightly fewer than the 3,823 accepted the year before. The OPG puts the dip down to a focus on large, complex cases and tighter triage that stops invalid concerns becoming investigations.

Set against the register, that is about one concern for every 800 powers of attorney, and one investigation for every 2,900. Both ratios overstate the rate for attorneys a little, because the figures also cover deputies, whose supervision caseload stood at 66,486.

The OPG closed 2,982 investigations during the year. Of those:

- 82 per cent needed no further action, either because the OPG's investigation resolved the problem or because there was no evidence for the concern.
- 13 per cent led to Court of Protection action, up from 11 per cent the year before.
- 5 per cent were resolved short of court, for example by asking an attorney to provide a revised account a few months later.

Thirteen per cent of 2,982 closed investigations is a little under 400 cases that ended in Court of Protection action. That is the closest the published figures come to a count of the most serious cases, and it covers deputies as well as attorneys.

![Horizontal bar chart: of OPG investigations closed in 2025-26, 82 per cent needed no further action, 13 per cent led to court action and 5 per cent were resolved short of court.](https://unforged.ai/media/52ba0535bbad-investigation-outcomes-1280.webp)

Outcomes of OPG investigations closed, 2024-25 and 2025-26. Source: Office of the Public Guardian, Annual report and accounts 2025 to 2026

The comparisons with last year use corrected figures. The OPG had originally reported 3,465 investigations closed in 2024-25, with 24 per cent going to court. A data cleanse found historic cases counted in the total, and the corrected figure is 2,959; the report says the outcome percentages published previously were inaccurate. Use the corrected split, not the 2024-25 report's.

## Investigations are taking longer

The pressure shows in the time taken. The OPG's target is to conclude an investigation in 70 working days. In 2025-26 the average was 198, up from 138 in 2024-25 and 93 in 2023-24. Active investigations at 31 March 2026 stood at 3,224, against 2,566 a year earlier and 1,778 the year before that.

Triage is holding up. The OPG risk assessed 97 per cent of safeguarding concerns within two working days, against a target of 95 per cent. That is the stage at which it looks for immediate risks and refers cases to the police or social services where needed. The report does not say which later stage accounts for the extra time.

In April 2025 the OPG began a programme of work to strengthen its investigations, and it has since set up an Investigations Project: more investigators, digital and AI tools to cut administrative work, and refined thresholds for which concerns become investigations. It says new staff will take time to train and the changes to have full effect.

## Why the numbers keep rising

The OPG links the rise in concerns to the growing number of LPAs on the register. It received 1,589,500 applications to register powers of attorney in 2025-26, the highest ever, averaging 6,307 a day, with a record 11,645 in a single day. Annual applications have nearly doubled since 2018-19, and the register passed 10 million powers of attorney in October 2025.

![Bar chart: concerns raised with the OPG rose from 10,577 in 2023-24 to 13,183 in 2025-26; investigations opened were 3,823 in 2024-25 and 3,645 in 2025-26.](https://unforged.ai/media/26745529224f-concerns-investigations-1280.webp)

Concerns raised with the OPG and investigations opened, 2023-24 to 2025-26. Source: Office of the Public Guardian, Annual reports and accounts 2023 to 2024, 2024 to 2025 and 2025 to 2026

The Ministry of Justice's official statistics count registrations by calendar year rather than applications by financial year. The OPG registered 1,332,178 LPAs in 2025, after 1,490,205 in 2024, when registrations peaked as the OPG cleared a backlog that the pandemic and rising application volumes had built up. In April to June 2026 it registered 341,400 LPAs, up 17 per cent on the same quarter of 2025.

More powers of attorney in use means more opportunity for misuse. The OPG also reads the rise as greater public awareness of its oversight. The figures can't separate those effects.

## How abuse happens, in the OPG's own words

The OPG's case examples are mostly about money, and about what attorneys did under registered LPAs. In the 2025-26 report, a local authority raised concerns that attorneys were neglecting a donor's care and misappropriating funds through significant gifting. The attorneys provided no accounts, and the concerns were upheld. The court revoked both LPAs and appointed a deputy. In 2024-25, an attorney was alleged to have moved into the donor's home while the donor was in residential care and used the donor's money to renovate it; the OPG applied to remove both attorneys. In 2023-24, an attorney spent a donor's savings on purchases not in the donor's best interests, leaving care fees unpaid.

Cases closed with no action are instructive too. One attorney had moved a large sum between two of the donor's own accounts to keep it out of others' reach. Another had made transactions involving gifts and expenses that the OPG found concerning, returned the money when the OPG raised it, and was given guidance; the OPG found no intentional wrongdoing.

Fraud at the point of making the LPA is a different problem, and the OPG says less about it. Its guidance on objecting to registration lists fraud as a ground, giving as its example someone faking the donor's signature, alongside a donor being pressured to make an LPA. Section 22 of the [Mental Capacity Act 2005](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2005/9/section/22) lets the Court of Protection direct that an LPA is not to be registered if it is satisfied that fraud or undue pressure was used to induce the donor to make it, and revoke it if the donor lacks capacity to do so. The OPG's 2023-24 report named reputational risk from "LPAs made fraudulently" among its key risks. None of these sources says how often it happens.

## Where the paper process is weak

Every LPA registered today has a paper version. The donor, attorneys and certificate provider sign a printed form in a set order, witnesses attest the signatures, and the form is posted to the OPG, which scans and checks it.

The Ministry of Justice's 2021 consultation, Modernising Lasting Powers of Attorney, was candid about what that protects. A witness only has to confirm that a person signed; they need not know the people involved or check that the person signing is who they claim to be. Nor, it noted, does the process include any identity verification. It falls to the certificate provider to confirm that the donor understands the LPA and that there is no undue pressure or fraud.

The same consultation found that around 15 per cent of LPAs in 2019-20, about 140,000, had errors that made them imperfect or invalid, and that signing and witnessing mistakes caused 74 per cent of imperfect LPAs and 59 per cent of invalid ones. Errors are not evidence of fraud, but they show how often the signing stage goes wrong, and the consultation concluded that witnessing currently provides limited safeguards.

## What the Powers of Attorney Act 2023 changes

The [Powers of Attorney Act 2023](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/42/contents) amends Schedule 1 to the Mental Capacity Act 2005. It is the legislation the OPG has described as allowing it to provide a digital LPA. Among other things, it:

- requires that the application to register be made by the donor, rather than by the donor or an attorney;
- allows regulations to set requirements for establishing or verifying the identity of people named in an LPA or taking part in the application, and bars the OPG from registering an LPA that fails them unless the court directs it;
- lets third parties, not just the donor, attorneys and people named in the LPA, object to registration, and bars the OPG from registering where evidence reasonably supports an objection on a prescribed ground, unless the court directs it;
- requires the OPG to take prescribed steps to put right an LPA that fails the formal requirements in a prescribed way;
- makes the register entry sufficient proof of the contents of an LPA registered in electronic form.

The government's 2022 response to the consultation said it would seek to verify the identity of the donor and the certificate provider, and would consider a range of identification options, because not everyone has documents that can be verified online.

The Schedule is not in force. Commencement is left to regulations by the Lord Chancellor under section 3(5), and as of 18 October 2026 legislation.gov.uk still shows the Schedule as prospective, with no commencement regulations listed. The OPG's 2025-26 report describes work with the Ministry of Justice on service design and on the legislative changes needed to begin live testing.

When it does arrive, identity checks will make it harder to create an LPA in someone else's name. They will do much less about the cases that fill the OPG's reports, where the problem was what a registered attorney later did with the power.

## What the numbers do and don't tell you

These figures measure the OPG's workload, not the prevalence of abuse. A concern is an allegation, and most are signposted to other services, such as social services or the police. An investigation closed with no further action may have found nothing wrong, or may have put something right. Concerns about deputies and attorneys are counted together. And abuse that nobody reports is not in the figures at all.

Court statistics don't fill the gap. The Ministry of Justice's Court of Protection tables recorded 1,583 applications relating to LPAs in calendar year 2025, but they classify applications by type, not by the allegation behind them. Not every LPA case before the court is about abuse. In 2025-26, a financial year rather than a calendar one, the OPG filed 965 applications asking the court to rule on instructions or preferences in LPAs that might not be legally compliant. Separately, it filed 431 supervision and investigation applications, down from 509, a fall it puts partly down to filing test cases first in groups of cases about the same attorney or deputy.

What can be said is that cases ending in Court of Protection action run to a few hundred a year, against a register of more than ten million, and that the number of active investigations and the time they take are both rising.

> If you are a bank, care provider or solicitor asked to act on an LPA, ask the attorney for an access code and check it on the OPG's View an LPA service, which shows whether the LPA is registered and still valid, who the attorneys are and any instructions. If you suspect an attorney is misusing their power, report it to the OPG's safeguarding unit, and call the police if you think a crime has been committed.

## Checking the signature

Where an organisation holds a donor's own signatures and wants to check the one on an LPA, or on an instruction given under it, [Unforged Nib](https://unforged.ai/nib/product) is a signature verification API: it compares the signature on a document with the person's own reference signatures and returns one of six verdicts, with reasons a reviewer can read. A failed check always goes to a person; it is never an automatic rejection.

Try Nib on your own documents: [Start free](https://unforged.ai/signup)

## Sources

- Office of the Public Guardian, [Annual report and accounts 2025 to 2026](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6a56563031fb6daf31413685/20260517-opg-anual-report-2025-to-2026.pdf), covering 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026
- Office of the Public Guardian, [Annual report and accounts 2024 to 2025](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6878c0f77ea20916863638b1/opg-annual-report-2024-to-2025.pdf)
- Office of the Public Guardian, [Annual report and accounts 2023 to 2024](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66a1092ffc8e12ac3edb03ff/opg-annual-report-and-accounts-2023-to-2024.pdf)
- Ministry of Justice, [Family Court Statistics Quarterly: April to June 2026](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-court-statistics-quarterly-april-to-june-2026), Table 21 and Court of Protection tables
- Ministry of Justice, [Modernising Lasting Powers of Attorney](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/60f5a5afd3bf7f5685132db0/mlpa-consultation-document.pdf), consultation, July 2021
- Ministry of Justice, [Modernising Lasting Powers of Attorney: government response](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/628214e78fa8f5561a6b264b/mlpa-consultation-response.pdf), May 2022
- [Powers of Attorney Act 2023](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/42/contents), including section 3 and the Schedule
- [Mental Capacity Act 2005, section 22](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2005/9/section/22)
- GOV.UK, [Object to the registration of a power of attorney](https://www.gov.uk/object-registration-power-attorney)
- GOV.UK, [Using the donor's LPA: access codes and View an LPA](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/using-the-donors-lpa-access-codes-and-view-an-lpa)
- GOV.UK, [Report a concern about an attorney, deputy or guardian](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/report-a-concern)