Be wary of using Ramsdens as financial deputy if your loved one's funds get near to the threshold below which a deputy cannot charge more than the fixed annual fee.
Ramsdens Court of Protection(COP) team in Halifax have badly let down my mother for whom I am primary carer. I am in the process of asking various authorities on how to have them investigated for:
- Not responding promptly to urgent request for critically needed equipment to prevent life-threatening heat exhaustion;
- Ignoring questions about moving deputyship to a lower cost solicitor local to where we are now living, abroad, after telling me that Mum's funds are getting low so they need to tighten their belts;
- Going on 'fishing trips' to find any excuse to pause large payments (including the equipment mentioned in first point): First they asked a barrister's opinion, who told them they should continue to fund care as if we were still in the UK, then instead of following the advice, going to ask someone else, whose suggestion of opening a case at the COP they seemed to prefer -- the COP can take years to consider cases, during which time their client would have died of heat exhaustion last summer if I had not personally funded the equipment needed to protect mum from the 40-degree plus temperatures that many elderly people have died of here
I can only assume that Barristers do not give advice for free, so I would like an independent investigation to look into whether and how much they charged from Mum's funds that are under their care, and whether the Barrister in question is often given fees by our deputy, in other words whether there is some mutual back-scratching going on at clients' expense.
UPDATE: Ramsdens have replied below that I am not their client. Given Mum's dementia this basically means Ramsdens are trying to avoid transparency about their work, knowing that Mum cannot sign any kind of power of attorney. Hopefully they won't be able to hide from auditors.
