declaring assets to social services

Just an aside. The person can pay for their funeral up-front, and that is a legitimate thing to do. The LAs may not like it, but it's legal and sensible. There's a couple of organisations which will guarantee this & the funeral directors have to belong to the schemes, in case they have gone bust when the time comes.

Nina speak to a solicitor about leaving your house in trust to your son. I would also think about making you and your husband tenants in common rather than joint tenants. If your son will need supporting financially after you have died, it might be possible for the house to finance his care. Have you made PoAs for all three of you?

I pray neither I nor H ever need care.
We have been morgage free for 9 yrs now. We could not afford to pay our children the market rent for this house if we signed it over anyway and it's a fairly modest 3 bed semi. I'm curious, would the rent rule still apply as our son who can't live independantly lives with us and will do so for the forseeable future. I know they can't say we need to sell if in our name and one or other of us still lives here but will defer until the other person is no longer living here.

Coming late to this, but I'm afraid local authorities can go back a number of years to reclaim any assets given away if they suspect 'deliverate deprivation' i.e. to avoid care home fees.

In the meantime though have a look at www.care-co-operative.co.uk which is trying to negotiate lower fees for self funders.

If you belong to Experian, they have details of all sorts of assets. I once signed up for a free trial and was amazed at how much they knew about me, including savings accounts I'd completely forgotten about.

I expect the DWP have access to Experian. I know they can check bank/credit card accounts and will query payments when there is no declared source of income. They also check property purchases and sales. I know that, because I was contacted about a property transaction from years ago. (It was all above board.)

I'm sure there are ways of defrauding the system, but I don't know of any - and I can't afford the accountants to do it for me!

There are certainly ways they can check as the others have said and I'm sure at some point checks are made.

thanks for those replies. i must stress, we arent planning to fraud anybody. we are all done and dusted, house sold, self funding. but it did cross my mind that social services accepted the paperwork we had and was there some way they could check further and do they check further or take the persons word for it.

They do check assets. And they can put a legal charge on them which means that any money owed to SSD can be taken out of what remains after the person's death.

Yes, I think they can, although I am not sure what the exact procedure is.

Usually they just withdraw funding so the person who has hidden the assets is left with care home fees unpaid or help withdrawn if the help is not paid for.

A good rule is to never be too clever when dealing with any government body on financial issues. That especially applies to Inland Revenue and Customs.

In France all public services can get a court order to access your bank accounts, (and take money out of them too), if you're in debt to them, or they suspect you're hiding something.
Can they do this in the UK too?

I posted too soon. Some people will succeed in cheating Social Services, but not many

Yes, Social Services can and do check on assets if they suspect fraud, and even not, particularly nowadays when they are so short of cash. It is probable difficult to check if the person concerned has kept all the money in cash in a sock under the mattress but
remember all banks, building societies and other financial organisations are bound by law to declare details of all the people who receive interest payments or dividends to HMRC and I know the DSS check benefit recipients assets against that information because I had a client who had to repay several thousand pounds through an inadvertent failure to declare an asset (she was old and ill).

They will also check whether the care receiver has given assets away, with or without legal arrangements, because if someone does give their assets away and SS can show it was with the intention of not paying for care fees, then the local authority will act as if the care receiver still owns that asset and not pay for social care.

If you give your house away decades before any care needs arise, but still live in it, you have to pay the market rent. I fyou don't, again it will be assumed that you still own the asset and the SS will act accordingly. I had a client in his 90s who had given his house to his children when he was in his 70s and because house prices and desirabilty had shot up, the rent he was paying 20 years later exceeded his pension and he was sitting in a huge valuable house, with nothing to live on (the Revenue check that the rent is being paid)