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March 30, 2020 By Baron Grey Limited

Why you should make a Lasting Power of Attorney

Given the unprecedented times we are currently having, there is no time like the present to put in place steps to ensure your affairs can be dealt with if the unexpected happens.

What is a Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA)?

A LPA is a legal document that allows you to appoint one or more people as your attorney to help you manage your affairs for you if you are unable to for any reason. You can also appoint replacement attorneys who will step in if something happens to your chosen attorneys.

There are 2 types;

Health and Welfare which allows your attorneys to make decisions on your behalf regarding such things as moving into a care home, medical care and also provides you with the opportunity to detail your instructions as to whether or not you wish to consent to life sustaining treatment.  This LPA only comes into force once you lose mental capacity.

Property and Financial allows your attorney/s to manage your bank or building society account, pay bills or sell property for example. Unlike the Health LPA this one can come into effect as soon as it is registered if you choose for it do so.

How safe is a LPA against financial abuse?

Part of the process of entering into a LPA is that a certificate provider signs the form to confirm that you understand the power you are giving and that you have not been put under any pressure to do so.

Whilst no longer mandatory, you can also notify people under the LPA of what you are intending to do which allows them time to raise any objections that they have.

The LPA allows you to state any preferences or instructions that you have which your attorney must abide by. For example you can provide instructions as to when you would permit your home to be sold or that you wish to have quarterly reports regarding your finances.

What happens if I lose capacity and do not have a LPA?

If you do not enter into a LPA and you lose your mental capacity, your loved ones will  need to apply to the Court of Protection to become your Deputy to make decisions for you which is a much more time consuming process and will cause delays in your affairs being able to be dealt with.

At the end of the day, LPAs allow to have the peace of mind that your affairs will be dealt with as per your wishes by people that you trust.

By Emma Faulkner

May 24, 2018 By Baron Grey Limited

The Pitfalls Of Buying At Auction

The Pitfalls Of Buying At Auction

Whilst the property seen in an auction catalogue may seem a bargain, there is highly likely to be a reason for this.

In auction sales, the properties are generally in need of substantial repair and/or modernisation. If you do not possess any experience in auction purchase, it can prove risky.

It is therefore recommended that before making a bid at auction, you ensure that your financing have been put into place in readiness at short notice. This is because the timescale imposed is extremely tight, namely if your bid is accepted at auction, then you sign the contract there and then and you pay a 10% deposit. You will then have approximately 28 days in which to complete the transaction. If you fail to meet these deadlines then you will incur financial penalties.

When considering auction purchases, it is advisable to obtain a copy of the auctioneers’ catalogue. If you find a property that takes your interest, it is advisable to obtain the legal pack which is generally available from the auctioneers’ website. You can then instruct a solicitor to inspect the title documentation to check whether the title contains any awkward covenants or restrictions. The solicitor will also check the auctioneers contract to ascertain whether the conditions of sale prior to any bidding. The solicitor is likely to make a charge for this service although should be successful at auction, the same solicitors can deal with completion of the matter on your behalf and the fee charged for investigating the title documents is likely to be deducted from the cost of the conveyancing bill. Prior to making a bid it is strongly recommended that you arrange a survey to be carried out.

Whilst you will incur the costs of the above and your bid may not prove successful, such advice and survey is likely to save you money in the long term as you may end up with the property which has restrictions that are not suitable for your purposes and the property may have many structural defects.

Written By: Minnie Waite & Clive Whitern

May 9, 2018 By Baron Grey Limited

Court Closures – Local Justice for Local People?

Since 2011, the Ministry of Justice has closed 200 courts and tribunals across England and Wales. The Ministry is currently consulting on whether to close a further eight across five regions in the coming months.

Save within the Treasury, there is little appetite for this latest round of culls, with MPs from all sides and a legal profession united for once standing opposed to this further erosion of the principle that justice should be dispensed locally.

There are now vast swathes of the country where people have to travel long distances in order to get to court, and what if you don’t have a car and have to rely on public transport? It will be the rural communities that will be hardest hit. As an MP in Derbyshire has observed, since the closure of Buxton Magistrates Court, people now have to travel 40 miles in order to get to Chesterfield Magistrates’ Court on the other side of the Pennines, a journey that can take 90 minutes on a good day.

How can this be right? Just think about this common scenario. A person arrested and charged with an offence is remanded into custody overnight to go to their nearest court the next day. They have to be taken there. Since the transportation of prisoners has been outsourced, the transport van used to pick the prisoner up has to travel from its home base, usually some distance away, to several police stations in the locality in order to pick up prisoners to transport them to several different courts. Our unfortunate chap will be lucky to arrive at court in the morning.

In the meantime, the victim may want to attend the hearing, as might the families of the defendant. They might be youths, elderly or disabled. They might not drive. They might have valuable information that they wish to pass on to the advocates at court in order to assist with the court proceedings. How will they get to a court which could be in an area they don’t know and have no idea how to get to at short notice? What about the magistrates (who are volunteers and are the clearest example of local justice being meted out by local people) who will now be expected to travel to areas that they have no inherent knowledge of in order to dispense justice?

The government justifies its position on the basis of statistics – that courts are working well under capacity, so therefore close courts and make the remaining ones work harder. This logic is deeply flawed as there are complex reasons as to why a court room may not necessarily be sitting for its full allocation of hours in a day (one of them being that everyone is waiting for the prison vans to arrive!).

When I started out on my legal career in South West London in the early 2000s, we had magistrates’ courts in Kingston, Richmond, Wimbledon, Acton, Ealing and Hammersmith. Of these six, Kingston, Richmond and Acton have closed, and Ealing and Hammersmith are earmarked for closure. Only Wimbledon remains.

Above everything else, court closures deny the one thing that the system should be based on above everything else – justice for the people who use it.

April 13, 2018 By Baron Grey Limited

Knife Crime – Will Increasing Stop and Search Make a Difference?

35 people have been fatally stabbed in London since the beginning of the year, with more than 50 fatalities in the UK as a whole in the same period. According to recent figures released by the Office of National Statistics, stabbings in London are at their highest level for 6 years, with a staggering 23% rise from the previous year. It has been widely commented that there have been more murders in London in the past 4 months than in New York, something that would have been considered inconceivable only a short time ago.

The government and the courts have been concerned about the rising use of knives in the commission of criminal offences for some time. Increased sentences for knife offences have been around since 2008 and a there is now a minimum 6 month prison sentence for those who are convicted of a knife offence for a second time.

Why then, are these deterrents not making a difference? One factor may be the reduction in the use of stop and search powers by the police. For many years the police were heavily criticised for what was perceived to be an indiscriminate use of these powers by disproportionately targeting ethnic minority groups without reasonable grounds for doing so. For instance, black people were 6 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people.

When Theresa May was Home Secretary, she openly criticised the police for their stop and search powers, so much so that the numbers of stop and search began to fall dramatically. Since her election to the role of Prime Minister, the numbers have kept on falling. For instance, people from a white background saw a 38% decrease in stop and search between 2016 and 2017.

So what powers do the police have to detain a person for purposes of a search? Generally speaking, the police are entitled to stop and search an individual if they have reasonable grounds for suspecting that a person is carrying illegal drugs, weapons, stolen property or an object used for the commission of a crime. The police officer must give you their name, the police station they are from and the reason they want to search you. They must tell you what they expect to find.

Will increasing the use of stop and search, and perhaps controversially, targeting certain groups within society (as advocated by Trevor Phillips), lead to a decrease in the shocking statistics we have seen recently? Certainly, something needs to be done. People need to feel safe where they live. The decrease in police numbers and lack of “bobbies on the beat” contribute to the feeling that the police have abandoned the streets to the criminals. When was the last time you saw an officer patrolling your local neighbourhood? Perhaps we should look at the modelled approach in tackling violent crime that has proved so successful in both New York, closer to home, Glasgow? This may work in the short-term, but a long-term sustainable solution is needed, for which there is no simple answer.

The causes run deep. Policing, and with it stop and search, is only one part of the solution. Money must be found to tackle poverty and increase educational awareness of those who are the most impressionable, such as the young. Only when the root causes are tackled will knife crime diminish on a long-term basis.

Written By : Ben Hall & Simran Chawla

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