Hooray: a great example of unnecessarily complicated government paperwork is to be sorted

I’ve written before about the massive volume of paperwork generated by the Office of the Public Guardian:

I’ve no doubt that it was well intentioned people who supported the Mental Capacity Act 2005 and its provisions (in England and Wales) for people to be able to lay down instructions on what should happen if they are no longer able to make decisions for themselves.

Having a clear legal framework in which people can specify who can make decisions about their health, welfare and financial affairs is a good idea. It needs to balance letting people decide what they want to happen and protecting vulnerable people against others misusing powers over their lives. Some bureaucracy and paperwork is therefore inevitable – and more than that, welcome.

And yet, look at the paperwork involved:

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This is what I was sent after I contacted the Office of the Public Guardian asking for the necessary forms. In fairness to them, their website was easy to find (even though I didn’t know the name of the organisation) and they responded promptly to my query. Some serious effort has been put in to making the documentation light on jargon and easy to understand sentence by sentence.

But I’ve ended up with a huge bundle of paperwork, including two guidance booklets that firmly inform me I must read them first before proceeding. That’s 88 pages for starters. Then there are the myriad forms, not to mention the financial charges involved which look like they would come to £240 (gulp).

Even for me – in full time work and lover of paperwork – this is a pretty daunting combination.

The net result is that a well-intentioned system to help people have control over their lives has ended up a complicated and expensive one. One particular complaint of mine is the duplication of information required across two forms:

Here’s a simplification I’d offer for starters: the two different Lasting Power of Attorney Forms – one for property/financial affairs and one for health/welfare are largely the same. So why not have one omnibus form that allows you legally to do both processes but avoids the large amount of duplication?

Well, finally just that reform is set to be made. Interestingly, the reform has been triggered in large part by attempt to streamline pretty much every ‘transactional service’ offered by the government as part of the new gov.uk website. The team doing that are ace (hence my description of them as The best government team you’ve not heard of) and their strong impetus to make systems simpler in order to make for easy to use website pages is helping push through changes that the OPG (and indeed Parliament) had previously failed to instigate.

Last month a government consultation closed which included this:

Since their inception, the design of the LPA forms has been subject to ongoing debate in terms of style, substance and length. A key aspect of the debate on the forms has been to try to balance the need to keep them short, whilst providing sufficient, clear information and guidance to make their completion as straightforward as possible. Suggestions have also been made about developing a ‘combined’ application form, in addition to the separate forms. As evidence suggests that individuals who make both property and financial affairs and health and welfare LPAs tend to appoint the same person(s) in the majority of applications, this would seem to be a reasonable proposal.

Hooray.

At last.

And why did it take so long?