the times | Saturday May 28 2022 63
Money
with financial organisations and
manage the LPA if needed.
The service allows users to show fi-
nancial organisations a summary of the
LPA, keep track of who is using it and
see who and which organisations have
access to it.
To set it up you need an activation
key, which is found in the letters sent by
the OPG, which also explain how to use
the service.
By mid-February — five months
after they applied for their LPAs and a
month after they received them —Geoffrey, Marguerite and their child-
ren had still not received their activa-
tion letters.
Geoffrey sent two email reminders
and phoned the OPG, but had no luck.
At the end of April they finally received
letters regarding his LPA, but were still
waiting on Marguerite’s.
“While we’re fine now; things can
change quickly. No one knows what to-
morrow might bring,” Geoffrey said.
“We feel like we are hitting a brick wall
when trying to do the right thing.”
The OPG said: “Lasting power of at-torney has been in place since January
for both applications. We are investi-
gating why letters sent to applicants
have not been received and have sent
further copies.”
Since Money approached the OPG,
Geoffrey and his two children have re-
ceived the letters needed to activate the
Use the LPA service for Marguerite’s
LPA.
The application process for an LPA
has been branded time-consuming and
hard to navigate, and families report
being rejected for what appears to be noreason. Severe delays caused by the
pandemic have continued at the OPG,
and the government website warns
people to allow 20 weeks for an applica-
tion to be processed.
Last week the Ministry of Justice
announced plans to overhaul the
system in a bid to make it “quicker to
use, easier to access and even more
secure from fraud”. It proposes allowing
people to make an LPA application
entirely online, and will include new
identification checks to strengthen
verification.purchase deal cards charge no interest
on new spending for a fixed period.
There are 63 zero per cent purchase
credit cards, with an average interest-
free term of 306 days, according to the
data provider Moneyfacts. There are 69
balance transfer cards and the average
zero per cent term is 610 days. The long-
est interest-free balance transfer deal is
34 months from Virgin Money, and the
longest purchase deal is 24 months
from Barclaycard.
Balance-transfer card providers usu-
ally charge a fee of a percentage of
the balance being transferred. Some
cards, however, come with no fees
in return for a shorter term.At the start of this month the FCA is-
sued a press release that called on “all
investors to be scam smart and check
the advice on our ScamSmart website”.
In 2019 the FCA spent £2.12 million
on advertising its ScamSmart cam-
paign. That year the page received
123,446 views and there were 122,437
cases of APP fraud; so as push payment
fraud has risen, the number of people
looking at the FCA’s website has fallen.
Last November Google told MPs it
would give the FCA £2.19 million of ad-
vertising for its ScamSmart campaign.
Mark Taber, an anti-fraud cam-
paigner who reports scams to the FCA,
said: “The number of visits to the
ScamSmart pages, the starting point
for consumers to learn about scams and
what to look out for, is minuscule. It’s
much lower than I was expecting.”
The FCA said: “The law requiring
people to consent to cookie tracking
when they visit websites means the
number of visits recorded for the vast
majority of websites has fallen since
2019.” It said it had tracked 2 million vis-
its to Scam Smart since it launched.
George NixonWays to spend on a credit card wisely
W
hether it’s the cost-of-living
crisis or the end of pandemic
restrictions, the country is
falling back in love with its credit cards.
In the first three months of this year
consumers borrowed £57.8 billion on
credit cards, including a record
£19.6 billion in February alone, accord-
ing to the Bank of England.
Some borrowers will be struggling to
make ends meet, but for those who can
pay off their debt on time, using a credit
card can help with budgeting and
spreading the cost of big purchases.
Credit cards also offer consumer pro-
tections you don’t get on debit cards
and often come with rewards. Here’s
how to use them sensibly.
Don’t make too many applications
You’re less likely to be accepted if you
have lots of outstanding debts or make
lots of applications in a short period.
Use a comparison site when looking
for a new card rather than just taking
one from your bank.
Interest-free cards
These come in two varieties. Balance
transfer cards allow you to move exist-
ing credit card debt to a card that char-
ges no interest for a set period, while
Andrew Hagger, from the personal
finance website Moneycomms, said:
“Don’t automatically plump for the
longest term if you can manage with a
shorter promotional timescale — the
one-off fee will be much less.”
The longest-rate available on a fee-
free card that doesn’t require you be a
current account customer is from
Sainsbury’s Bank, at 21 months.Double-check the interest rate
“Up to” is a key phrase here, because not
everyone will get the headline deal.
Barclaycard says that four in five ac-
cepted customers receive advertised
terms, but you can be offered a far
higher interest rate than you hoped for.
Novuna Personal Finance offers the
lowest rate to borrow £5,000, repaid in
three years at 3.4 per cent.
However, its website says that the
maximum it could charge you, depend-
ing on circumstances, is 35.9 per cent.
The difference would take your overall
repayments from £5,262 to £7,747 ac-
cording to Moneyfacts.
Lenders often allow you to make
“soft” applications so you can find out
what you’re likely to be charged with-
out affecting your credit score.
George Nixon256k scams and still we’re
not checking if ads are real
O
nly a few thousand consumers
are visiting the anti-fraud sec-
tion of the Financial Conduct
Authority (FCA) website every month
despite a multi-million pound advertis-
ing campaign.
A freedom of information request by
Money found that the FCA’s Scam-
Smart page received 63,578 views last
year, an average of 5,300 a month.
In 2020, ScamSmart received 52,336
views — an average of 4,361 a month. It
has not received more than 20,000
views a month since March 2019.
Between the start of 2020 and the
end of June last year there were 256,110
cases of authorised push payment
fraud, according to the banking trade
body UK Finance.
The FCA has repeatedly encouraged
consumers to check ScamSmart before
considering an investment opportunity
amid a rise in this type of fraud.
Those who do visit it are asked to en-
ter details of what they are considering
investing before being warned about
“too good to be true” schemes and told
to check the regulator’s warning list of
unauthorised companies and scams.8Total credit card lending
1012141618£20bn2008 10 12 14 16 18 20 22Source: Bank of EnglandEight months and counting — why is
getting a power of attorney so hard?
W
hen Geoffrey Cash
phoned the Office of
the Public Guardian
(OPG) to ask for in-
formation on his and
his wife’s lasting powers of attorney
(LPA), he was 54th in the queue.
It had been six months since they first
applied for the LPAs and Geoffrey, a 77-
year-old retired banker, was chasing
the OPG for a letter that would let him
and his family set up an online service
to manage the powers of attorney for
him and his wife, Marguerite, 74.
“I felt very annoyed, but also sympa-
thetic to the others in the queue as well
as those working the phones,” Geoffrey
said. “We were trying to set everything
up so we were sorted if anything bad
were to happen to either of us.”
Geoffrey and Marguerite applied for
their lasting power of attorneys in Sep-
tember last year, paying the £82 fee and
printing the forms from the govern-
ment’s website.
An LPA is a legal document that
allows you to appoint one or more
people to make decisions on your
behalf concerning your healthcare or
financial affairs.
When the couple’s LPAs arrived mid-
January (about a month later than ex-
pected), they were also told their attor-
neys — each other and their two child-
ren, Zoey, 47, and Stephen, 45 — would
get letters explaining how to set up and
use a digital service called Use an LPA.
Whether or not someone is regis-
tered on the government’s Use an LPA
service will not affect an attorney’s
powers or prevent their acting on
them, but it can make it easier to deal
Marguerite and Geoffrey Cash waited months for a letter about their lasting powers of attorneySetting up a power of attorneyFirst choose your attorneys and
whether you want them to act
“jointly” or “jointly and severally”.
If you opt for jointly, your attorneys
will only be able to act together,
while jointly and severally means
each can act independently.
You can apply for a lasting power
of attorny (LPA) online or by post.
Visit gov.uk to download the forms
to print or fill in digitally. If you fill
them in online, you will have to
print the completed form.
Next you will need to get
signatures from someone who can
confirm that you have the capacity
to make an LPA (such as your
doctor), the attorneys you have
chosen and your witnesses — these
signatures need to happen in a
specific order, listed on the forms.
Once the forms are complete,
you register the LPA with the Office
of the Public Guardian (OPG). You
can do this online if you filled out
the forms digitally or you can send
the paper copy to the OPG. It will
then return a stamped copy of your
LPA. It takes up to ten weeks to
register an LPA, but there have
been delays since the pandemic.
You cannot set up an LPA once
you have lost capacity.Geoffrey Cash applied
in September. Now
he is 54th in the
phone queue, writes
Imogen Tew