Joint and Substitute Attorneys in Scotland: How Multiple Appointments Work

You Can Appoint More Than One Attorney

A Scottish power of attorney — continuing (financial), welfare, or combined — does not have to name a single person. The Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000 allows the granter to appoint multiple attorneys, and the way those appointments are structured has significant practical consequences.

Getting this wrong can freeze decision-making at exactly the moment the family needs it most.

Joint vs Joint-and-Several

When appointing two or more attorneys, the granter must specify how they operate:

Joint attorneys are expected to act together. The deed controls what happens if one attorney dies, loses capacity, or becomes unable to act, so the remaining attorney should not assume they can act alone.

Joint-and-several attorneys can generally act independently, subject to the wording of the deed. The deed should be checked for any requirements to consult or agree.

Most solicitors in Scotland recommend joint-and-several for practical reasons. Joint appointments create a bottleneck: if one attorney is on holiday, in hospital, or simply unreachable, no decisions can be made. For continuing (financial) powers, this can mean bills going unpaid while both signatures are gathered. For welfare powers, it can mean medical decisions delayed while both attorneys are located.

Hybrid Arrangements

The deed can specify different structures for different powers. A common arrangement:

• Joint for major decisions: selling property, changing investments, moving into a care home.
• Several for routine decisions: paying bills, day-to-day banking, routine medical appointments.

This gives the granter a safeguard against unilateral large decisions while keeping daily administration functional. The deed must clearly define which category each type of decision falls into — vague language creates bank disputes when one attorney tries to act alone on something the bank considers "major."

Substitute Attorneys

A substitute attorney is a backup. They do not act unless the conditions in the deed for substitution are met. The deed should state those conditions and the order of succession.

Substitute attorneys are particularly important when the granter appoints a single primary attorney. Without a substitute, the primary attorney's death or incapacity leaves the granter with no one authorised to act — and the family is back to the Sheriff Court for a guardianship order.

The deed should name substitute attorneys explicitly and specify the order of succession. A person not named in the deed cannot rely on being a substitute.

Who Can Be an Attorney in Scotland

The Adults with Incapacity Act sets relatively few formal restrictions:

• The attorney must be over 16.
• The attorney must have mental capacity themselves.
• For continuing (financial) powers, the attorney can be an individual or an incorporated body (e.g. a solicitor's firm or a trust company).
• For welfare powers, the attorney must be an individual — corporate bodies cannot hold welfare powers.
• Bankruptcy disqualifies an attorney from acting in a continuing (financial) role; it is not an absolute statutory bar to serving as a welfare attorney.

An attorney based outside Scotland may face practical difficulties — attending OPG registrations, visiting banks in person, and dealing with Scottish institutions from abroad adds delay and cost.

Practical Considerations

Choose someone who will actually do the work. Being named as an attorney is not an honorary role. A continuing attorney may need to manage bank accounts, pay care fees, deal with HMRC, and sell property while keeping detailed accounts and records. A welfare attorney may need to attend medical appointments, liaise with hospital staff, challenge care decisions, and make end-of-life treatment choices.

Geographic proximity matters. Banks and care homes in Scotland still operate largely in person. An attorney based in London managing accounts at Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh will spend significant time on phone transfers and posted documents.

Family dynamics matter more than legal theory. Appointing all three adult children as joint attorneys because it seems fair can paralyse decision-making if one child disagrees with the others. Joint-and-several with a clear decision-making protocol in the deed is usually more workable.

The attorney's own age and health. An 85-year-old spouse appointed as sole attorney may themselves lose capacity within a few years. Appointing the spouse as primary with an adult child as substitute covers this risk.

Getting the Structure Right

Our Scotland Power of Attorney Toolkit includes a decision framework for choosing between joint, joint-and-several, and substitute appointments, along with the OPG pre-submission checklist that catches the structural errors the registry auto-rejects for.

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