The OPG supervision overhaul: General, Minimal, and the property duty that does not move

A letter has gone out to property and affairs deputies this year telling them their case now sits under either General or Minimal supervision. It is worth reading carefully, and it is worth being clear about what the change does and what it leaves alone. It alters how closely the Office of the Public Guardian watches the deputy. It does not alter what the deputy owes the property.

The old system sorted every case into one of four supervision types, the familiar 1, 2A, 2 and 3. That has gone, replaced by two levels. Most deputies sit under General supervision, which keeps the full annual report and the closer working relationship with the OPG. A property and affairs deputy managing less than £21,000 can move to Minimal supervision after the first year, if the OPG agrees the closer eye is no longer needed, with a shorter report and a lighter touch. The fees follow the split. General supervision costs £320 a year, Minimal costs £35, and both come out of the protected party's estate.

Alongside the levels, the OPG has reorganised its own side. Rather than passing a deputy between departments by task, it now runs specialist teams by deputy type: lay, local authority, professional and panel, and health and welfare. Each team is meant to hold the case from start to finish. The review behind the change was prompted by a concern that the old model leaned too hard on policing deputies and not enough on supporting them, against caseloads that kept climbing. I think that is a fair read of where it had got to. A team that knows the file end to end beats being handed between desks, and sparing a small cash estate a full annual report is sensible. None of that is the part I want to flag.

Where a property case actually sits

The first thing to notice is that the headline change, the lighter Minimal tier, mostly passes property cases by. The £21,000 figure is a measure of the assets the deputy manages, and a case with the protected party's own home in it sits well above that line before you have counted anything else. An average house clears it many times over. This is not a rare shape for a case to take either. A great many property and affairs deputyships exist precisely because someone has gone into residential care and left a home standing behind them, which is the asset the deputy now has to manage and, in time, decide about. So in practice, if there is a property on the file, the case stays in General supervision, and Minimal picks up the smaller cash-only estates. For anyone managing a protected party's property, the tier they have been moved to is close to a sideshow. The question worth asking is what supervision, at either level, is actually looking at.

What supervision is built to measure

General and Minimal are a read on financial risk. The £21,000 line is a money line. The annual report that the two levels lengthen or shorten is, in the main, an account of what the deputy has done with the protected party's funds over the year: the income that came in, the spending that went out, the decisions taken, and the bank balances at the year end, set against the Deputy Standards. A case on Minimal supervision files a shorter version of that account, not a different kind of it. Supervision in this sense is the OPG keeping a proportionate eye on the handling of money, and the new model does that more sensibly than the four-type system it replaced. I have no quarrel with the reform on its own terms.

There is a second financial safeguard sitting underneath the supervision level, and it points the same way. Every property and affairs deputy has to take out a security bond, set by the court, before the order is sealed. The bond is cover against the deputy mishandling the estate. If the deputy causes a loss to the protected party's funds through misconduct or neglect, the bond is what the OPG can call on to put it right. It is a serious protection and it does real work. What it protects is the money. It does not put a roof back on a house, and it is not triggered by a house standing empty and going downhill. It answers a loss to the funds the deputy controls, and only that.

What none of it measures

What supervision does not measure, at any tier, is the condition of the bricks and mortar between reports. The Deputy Standards require a property and affairs deputy to keep the protected party's property secure and appropriately insured. That standard does not have a General version and a Minimal version. It does not get a closer look because the case is General, and it does not get relaxed because the case is Minimal. It is checked, like the rest, mostly through a report written once a year. A protected party in residential care whose home stands empty has a house that has to be kept secure and insured every week of that year, not only on the day the report is filed.

Here is where it bites. The annual report is a snapshot. The property is exposed every day between snapshots, and nothing in the supervision regime, old or new, is standing at the front door checking the locks were changed when the protected party went into care, or that the conditions on the unoccupied insurance policy are being met week to week. I have set out the gap between an insured property and a secured one for professional appointees separately, and it is the same gap that does the damage here. We have attended empty properties where nobody had been inside for months, because the file was quiet and nothing had obviously gone wrong yet. An account can balance to the penny while the house behind it quietly comes apart. The annual report is built to catch the first and not the second.

The visit, and what it is not

It is fair to ask about the one part of the regime that does put a person in a room: the Court of Protection Visitor. The OPG can send a General Visitor to see the protected party, and uses targeted and assurance visits where a case needs a closer look. This is a real and useful check, and on the right case it catches things a paper report never would. But it is a visit to the person, not an inspection of the property. A Visitor going to see a protected party in their care home is not driving on to the empty house afterwards to test the window locks, read the insurer's schedule, or check the heating is set to hold the place above freezing through the winter. The visit confirms the protected party is being looked after and their affairs are being run properly. It was never designed to be a property condition survey, and treating it as if it quietly covers the house would be a mistake.

When the property duty starts

It is worth being clear about when this duty starts. It starts at appointment, not at the first annual report, and not at the point the OPG sets a supervision level. I wrote in an earlier piece about the months of exposure that build up before the order even arrives. The order does not switch that exposure off. It hands it to the deputy, who carries it continuously from day one. The first significant call on the house, whether it is kept or sold, is its own decision with its own limits, which I have set out separately. The supervision tier sets how often the OPG looks in at the money. The duty to keep the house secure sits with the deputy the whole time, whoever is or is not looking.

A stake in the ground

The supervision level on a file tells you how closely the OPG watches the deputy's handling of the money, and how much the deputy pays for it. It has never told you whether the protected party's empty house is secure this week, and the move to General and Minimal does not change that. The reform recalibrated the oversight of the funds, restructured the teams behind it, and left the property duty exactly where it was, which is with the deputy, continuously, regardless of tier. A Minimal case is a lighter reporting burden. It is not a lighter property risk. And a General case does not come with anyone checking the house on the OPG's behalf either. The watching is of the deputy, not of the building.

I would be interested to hear from professional deputies, local authority deputies and the solicitors who instruct them on this. Whether the move to General and Minimal has changed how you resource the property side of a case at all, or whether you have a way of keeping the house in view between annual reports that works better than what I have described here. You can find me at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.

At Prospect PS we keep the protected party's property in continuous view from the day of appointment, whatever supervision level the case carries, because the house does not know what tier it is in.