It is a privilege to follow the excellent speech of my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild) and to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe) on bringing forward this important legislation unamended to Third Reading.
Powers of attorney, specifically lasting powers of attorney, are incredibly powerful and useful appointments. They allow people to retain control over aspects of their lives in circumstances where they might not otherwise be able to make decisions or take actions. In particular, lasting powers of attorney ensure that people have the opportunity to make provision for a future where they may no longer have the mental capacity to understand what is happening to them and therefore to make decisions about the things that they care about.
We all know that our population is ageing and that, as my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk illustrated with good statistics, the prevalence of dementia is increasing. For those people, such documents will become ever more important to ensure that they can continue to live the lives that they want to live. They will also be more important in protecting people who might otherwise be the target of fraud, scams and abuse. I have seen some terrible examples of that in my casework on behalf of Guildford constituents, where vulnerable
people have been taken advantage of in so-called romance scams and similar, without the protection of someone who can look after their best interests.
As has been said, hon. Members on both sides of the House agree that the current situation is unsustainable. The Office of the Public Guardian carries out manual administration checks and stores 11 tonnes of paper at any one time. LPA applications are generally increasing, with the number submitted for registration more than doubling between 2014-15 and 2019-20. That creates an ever-increasing need for staff, equipment and storage space.
The ability to use a digital channel alongside the paper route to make and register an LPA would help to resolve some of those issues. Most of the current manual checks could be automated to speed up the time it takes for applications to be processed, which I know has been an issue. It would also increase the Office of the Public Guardian’s resilience to backlogs. It is important that some safeguards remain, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock mentioned. Importantly, the Bill achieves sustainability for the Office of the Public Guardian while keeping LPAs as affordable as possible for everyone in society.
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