Every line on the statement: What the OPG's investigations tool means for property spend on a protected person's account

A question for anyone holding a lasting power of attorney or a deputyship order. Eighteen months ago, a payment of £3,400 left the account of the person you act for, to a payee that shows on the statement as something like "M HOLT SERVICES". Could you explain that payment today, from the file rather than from memory, to someone who has never met you and has never seen the property?

Most attorneys I have dealt with could explain it from memory. It was the roof. The gutters had gone, water was coming in over the back bedroom, and a builder the family had used before did the work. That is a perfectly good answer. The problem is where it lives. It lives in the attorney's head, and the person who is about to ask the question is no longer a person.

What the OPG has built

On 7 August the Office of the Public Guardian published an algorithmic transparency record for something it calls the Investigations Assistant. It is a Microsoft Azure tool that takes bank statements uploaded by OPG staff as spreadsheets and categorises every transaction on them, so that an investigator starts from a sorted picture of where the money went rather than from a pile of pages. It was tested between January and March 2026, and the record describes it as pre-deployment with a controlled live pilot to follow. On clean data it flags around 23% of transactions for a human to look at, and nothing leaves the tool without an investigator signing it off.

The record is written around attorneys, because that is where most concerns arrive, but it names deputies too, and the supervision side already has a deputy's annual report to read against the same statements. I would not read too much into the boundary. What matters is the direction.

The reason for the tool is in the OPG's annual report for 2025 to 2026, published in July. Concerns raised about attorneys and deputies rose 17% in the year to 13,183. The OPG accepted 3,645 of those into a full investigation and concluded 2,982, which left 3,224 open at the end of March, up from 2,566 a year earlier. The target for concluding an investigation is 70 working days. The average was 198. Anyone who has watched a family wait through one of those investigations, with the protected person's affairs half frozen in the meantime, will understand why the OPG wants the transaction analysis done in hours rather than weeks.

Sampling versus every line

The standard has not moved. An attorney has always been required to keep the donor's money separate from their own and to keep records of what they spend. A deputy has always had to account for every payment in the annual report and to keep the receipts behind it, because the OPG can ask for them, and does. I wrote about the supervision overhaul earlier this year, and the same point applied there. General or Minimal changes how often the OPG looks. It does not change what the deputy has to be able to show when it does.

What changes is coverage. An investigator working by hand samples. They read the statements, pick out the payments that look odd, and ask about those. A tool that categorises every line does not sample. Every payment gets a category, and every payment that does not fit a category gets a flag. The question the attorney used to be asked about three or four payments is now, in principle, a question about every payment on the account.

Where that lands hardest is property spend, and this is the part I want to be careful about, because it is where my own work sits.

Why property spend is the exposed category

Care fees are regular. Utilities are regular. A pension comes in on the same day each month and the care home takes its money on the same day each month, and a categorisation model learns that rhythm quickly. Property spend has no rhythm at all. It is lumpy and irregular, and it is paid to trades. A locksmith in March. A clearance firm in June. An insurer's premium in one lump, a gardener four times a year, a roofer once. The payee names on the statement tell you nothing. "M HOLT SERVICES" could be the builder who stopped the water coming in, or it could be the attorney's brother-in-law.

From the statement alone, a £3,400 repair and a £3,400 misappropriation are the same line. The only thing that separates them is what sits behind the line on the file.

We have been asked, more than once, to dig out a report on a job we did two or three years earlier because a family member had queried the payment and the deputy needed to show what the money had bought. When a payment is queried, the fact that works were done is not enough. The question is whether the file can show they were needed and that the price was fair.

Of the investigations the OPG concluded last year, 82% ended with no further action. The great majority of attorneys and deputies who get investigated have done nothing wrong. The cost to them was the investigation itself, months of it, and in my experience the property payments are the ones that take longest to close out, because they are the ones where the explanation was never written down.

The four things behind a defensible payment

I wrote in an earlier piece in this series that AI was changing what counts as reasonable evidence on a property file. This is the same argument from the other side of the table. The tool that reads the statement is at the regulator now. The file that answers it has to be with the attorney or the deputy, and it has to be written for a reader who was never there.

In practice that means four things sitting behind any property payment above the trivial. An invoice that names the property address and describes the works, rather than "labour and materials". A report with dated photographs showing the condition before and after, so the need is visible rather than asserted. A note of why the decision was made and for whose benefit, which for a deputy is a best interests decision under section 4 of the Mental Capacity Act and for an attorney is the same duty by a different route. And some evidence that the price was tested, whether that is three quotes or a written reason why quotes were not practical.

None of that is new. The OPG's Deputy Standards have expected it for years. What is new is that the gap between a payment and its explanation used to be found by a person with a limited number of hours and a large caseload, and it is now going to be found by a system with neither constraint.

The habit the tool exposes

I do not want to overclaim here. The tool is in pilot. It categorises transactions and flags the ones it is unsure about, and a human investigator still decides what any of it means. It may never touch the overwhelming majority of attorneys and deputies, whose accounts never attract a concern in the first place.

The risk is not the tool. The risk is the habit it exposes, which is the assumption that the explanation for a property payment can be assembled later, if anyone ever asks. On most accounts nobody ever asks, and the habit survives. On the account where somebody does ask, the attorney is reconstructing a decision from eighteen months ago against a report that has already categorised every line, and the reconstruction is what the investigation ends up being about.

The deputy's home decisions are where this bites hardest, and I have written before about how narrow the deputy's authority on the home actually is. A repair to a house the protected person may return to, a clearance of a house they will not, an insurance premium on a property that has stood empty for a year. Each of those is a payment on the statement. Each is also a decision that has to be defensible on its own terms, and the payment is now the thing that will surface the decision.

A stake in the ground

A payment on a protected person's account that only the attorney or deputy can explain is not, in my view, a defensible payment. The explanation has to be on the file, in a form a stranger could read, because the first reader is now a system that has never met anyone involved and the second reader is an investigator working through a backlog of over three thousand cases.

That standard was always the right one. The OPG has just removed the reason to put off meeting it.

I would be interested to hear from professional deputies and attorneys on this, and from the solicitors who support lay attorneys through an OPG enquiry. Whether you recognise the unexplained property payment from your own files, or whether you have a protocol for recording property decisions on a protected person's account that handles it better than what I have described here. You can find me at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.

At Prospect PS we put a dated, photographed report behind every piece of work we do on a protected person's property, because we think the payment should explain itself before anyone has to.