Goodmorning All, I have been speaking to my local authority Deputy Team for Property and Financial decisions, and they asked a question about the OPG102 - Deputy report form - Property and financial decisions (publishing.service.gov.uk) and specifically a question in Section 2 which states:
When was the client’s mental capacity to make decisions last assessed by a professional (such as a psychiatrist or social worker)?
NB: You are then asked to supply a date for when this was completed.
The concern of the Deputy Team is that in some cases this may have been done a decade ago.
I suppose my first thought is that the question is itself a very odd question, and not really in line with the MCA which is decision specific and not the ‘capacity to make decisions’. Secondly, there are plenty of people who have a Local Authority Deputy for Property and Affairs who have been accommodated and settled for many years and as such there has been no need to a Social Worker or Psychiatrist to assess capacity because there has been no decision that required capacity to be assessed in the first place (obviously if DoLS or Community DoL applied I would assume that the capacity assessment completed for the purposes of this and any future review of the arrangements would suffice?).
My question for the hive mind would be, if you have a client where there is clearly no evidence from those who care for the person that there has been any change in ‘the client’s mental capacity to make financial decisions’ should a Deputy when completing this box on the Deputy report form be concerned that they are putting in a date that may in fact be from a decade ago, because there has been no reason for any registered professional to assess the persons capacity for any other significant decision?
I suppose a supplementary question is whether there has been any case law around recording expectations generally when it comes to the Deputy report form?