"Rejected" is a single word covering three quite different outcomes, and which one you are dealing with decides what it costs. The Office of the Public Guardian checks three things before it registers an LPA: that the LPA is legally correct, that it has no errors, and that anyone entitled to object has had the chance.
Returned for correction
Cannot be registered at all
Referred to the Court of Protection
The paragraph that earns this page its links — the capacity cliff. The OPG's registration guide puts it without decoration: "If there are mistakes, OPG can't register the LPA and it can't be used." An LPA held unregistered in a drawer has not been checked by anyone. If the donor loses capacity before the error surfaces, the mistake can no longer be corrected — a donor without capacity cannot re-sign a document. What is left is an application to the Court of Protection, either for a deputyship or for a declaration that the LPA can be treated as valid — currently £432 to apply, before anything else.
This is the practical argument for registering immediately rather than "when it is needed": registration is the only quality check that exists, and it only works while it can still be acted on. Related: the capacity situation guide and the COP1 deputyship guide.
Signing out of order is the largest single cause of returned applications, and the least forgiving. The signatures are not three formalities on the same document — they are a sequence, and each one certifies something about the state of the document at the moment it was made. A certificate provider cannot certify that a donor understood a document the donor had not yet signed.
The signatures can be dated the same day or different days — the form says so explicitly. What cannot happen is a later step carrying an earlier date than the step before it. The LP1F checklist puts it in one line: "Sections 9, 10 and 11 were signed in order. Section 9 must have been signed first, then section 10, then section 11."
Every cause below is drawn from the OPG's own published guidance or from the wording printed on the form itself. The causes are grouped by the part of the document they come from, because that is how you check a form — page by page, not by category of error.
Section 7 is optional, most people leave it blank, and it produces a disproportionate share of the delays. The form's own warning is blunt: "if you give instructions that are not legally correct they would have to be removed before your LPA could be registered." Removing them is not something the OPG can do on its own.
Where the OPG considers a provision invalid, the Mental Capacity Act 2005 requires it to apply to the Court of Protection to have that provision severed. The court can strike wording out; it has no power to write different wording in. The rest of the LPA is then registered without it — which means the donor ends up with a document that no longer says what they intended, having waited months longer for it.
Contradicts joint and several
Contradicts a joint appointment
Gifts beyond the statutory power
The safe division is the one the form itself draws. Preferences use prefer and would like, and are guidance the attorneys should keep in mind. Instructions use must and have to, and bind them. If a sentence does not need to bind anyone, it belongs in the preferences box, where it cannot be severed — or in a conversation, which is where the form suggests most of it belongs. Related: the making an LPA guide.
Registering an LPA costs £92, and £184 for the usual pair. What a returned application costs depends entirely on which of the three outcomes in §I you are in.
Registration takes 8 to 10 weeks where there are no mistakes. The OPG's average across 2024–25 was 49 working days, against a 40-working-day target that includes the four-week statutory notice period. A returned application does not resume from where it stopped; it starts again, so a small error at section 11 typically costs a further two to three months, not two to three weeks.
The order that protects a family is: make it, register it, then keep it findable. Registration is the only point at which anyone independently checks the document, and there is no fast-track service for the day it turns out to matter. Related: the LPA fees figures page.
The OPG publishes its own final-check list. The version below is that list, reordered so the things that actually get applications returned come first.
Sections 9, 10 and 11 are signed in that order, and the dates prove it. On an LP1H, section 5 was signed and witnessed before section 9.
Section 15 is dated after every section 11. Jointly-appointed attorneys applying together have all signed it.
The certificate provider is eligible — not family, not an attorney, not an unmarried partner, not a business partner, not care-home staff. A lay certificate provider has known the donor well for at least two years.
No attorney witnessed the donor, and the donor witnessed no attorney. Every witness is over 18 and has given a full name and an address.
LP1H only — one option at section 5, A or B, signed and witnessed. Not both.
No correction fluid, no stickers. Every correction is struck through once and initialled by the person who made it.
Black or blue pen throughout, no pencil, handwriting legible.
All 20 pages are present — including the information page at section 8 and any page left blank — and nothing is stapled or bound.
Then it goes to the Office of the Public Guardian, PO Box 16185, Birmingham B2 2WH — loose, in order, with nothing missing.
None of the above is the hard part. The hard part is the years after, when the LPA is registered correctly and nobody can find it, and nobody knows which accounts it was made for. That is the part Valoren keeps.
England & Wales only. Scotland runs continuing and welfare powers of attorney registered with the Office of the Public Guardian (Scotland); Northern Ireland runs enduring powers of attorney. Neither uses the section numbers on this page.
Making the LPA in the first place
The parent explainer this page is downstream of — how to word section 7, choosing joint or joint and several, the full application walkthrough.
Read the guide→Caring for a Parent · £79Keep the household record once it's registered
The part this page doesn't cover — where the sealed copies live, which accounts the LPA was made for, and who can find it when it's needed.
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