England and Wales only. Published Mon 24th Aug 2026. This describes the process and is not legal advice.
If you name more than one attorney on a lasting power of attorney, the form asks how they should act. The choices are jointly, jointly and severally, or a mixture. Most people have never met those words before the form puts them in front of them, and the form does not explain what rides on the answer.
Quite a lot rides on it. This article explains the three options in plain terms, then turns the decision into the two questions it really comes down to. It covers England and Wales only, and it explains the process rather than giving legal advice.
Jointly and severally. Each attorney can act on their own, or together with the others. One can pay the electricity bill while another is on holiday. If one of them dies or can no longer act, the others carry on without interruption. This is the arrangement most families choose.
Jointly. Every decision is made by all your attorneys together, and every form, letter and instruction needs all their signatures. Nobody can act alone. It is slower by design, and that is its purpose: it is a safeguard for situations where you would rather no single person had control.
Jointly for some decisions, jointly and severally for the rest. You can ask for certain decisions, selling your house for instance, to need everyone, while everything else can be done by any one attorney. It is allowed, but every line you write is something the Office of the Public Guardian has to read and accept, so the wording has to be exact.
If you name more than one attorney and say nothing, the law treats them as appointed jointly. That default catches people out, because jointly is rarely what they meant.
The legal definitions are one thing. Day-to-day use is another.
Take a bank. One high street bank's published guidance says that where attorneys are appointed jointly, they can access the account by visiting a branch together, and it does not offer them debit cards, telephone banking, online banking or mobile banking individually. Every transaction needs everyone present. If one attorney lives in Leeds and the other in Lewisham, that is a trip for each standing order.
That is not a criticism of the bank. It is what joint means. The bank is doing exactly what the document tells it to do.
Here is the part of the decision that the form does not flag, and it matters more than the rest.
The law treats attorneys appointed jointly as a single unit. If one of them dies, loses capacity or becomes bankrupt, all of them stop being able to act. Not the one who died: all of them. The appointment fails as a whole.
A joint appointment therefore ends the moment one attorney dies, unless the lasting power of attorney names reserve attorneys and says how they step in. Without that, the document you spent months registering stops working on the day you need it most, and nobody can fix it if you no longer have the capacity to sign a new one.
Reserve attorneys, which the forms call replacement attorneys, are the answer. Under a joint appointment, the government's guide explains, when one original attorney can no longer act the reserves replace all the original attorneys at the same time. So if you appoint your two daughters jointly and name your son as the reserve, and one daughter dies, the other daughter stops too and your son takes over alone. If that is not what you want, it has to be written into the document.
Under a jointly and severally appointment the problem largely disappears. If one attorney drops out, the rest carry on, and the reserves only come in when nobody original is left.
We never ask a client whether they want jointly or jointly and severally. We ask two plainer things.
Do the people you have chosen get on?
Where the attorneys trust each other, jointly and severally is the straightforward answer. It keeps everything simple, it survives a death or an illness among the attorneys, and it does not put two people on a train every time a bill needs paying.
Where there are doubts, jointly is the safeguard. Brothers and sisters who are not the best of friends. A second marriage with children on both sides. A family where one person has a history of being a little too relaxed with other people's money. In those cases a joint appointment means nobody can act without the others seeing it. The cost is slowness, and the condition is that reserve attorneys are named, because a joint appointment without reserves is a document waiting to fail.
Is anyone you have chosen abroad, or often away?
This changes the answer more than people expect. An attorney in Perth or Chicago can do nothing at all under a joint appointment, because every decision needs everyone. Distance turns a safeguard into a deadlock. If one of your attorneys lives overseas or travels for months at a time, jointly and severally is close to essential.
Our own practice is to steer people away from appointing attorneys who live abroad in the first place. A property and financial affairs attorney may need to sit in a bank branch, sign in front of a solicitor, or collect post. Good intentions do not clear those hurdles from another time zone.
Sometimes the answers pull against each other. The attorneys do not entirely get on, which points to jointly, but one of them lives in Australia, which makes jointly unworkable.
There is no clever wording that solves that. The honest answer is to look again at who you are appointing. Either choose different attorneys, or choose people who are all here and accept a joint appointment with reserves. Trying to bridge the gap with a mixed appointment produces a document with several paragraphs of conditions, each of which the Office of the Public Guardian has to accept and each of which a bank clerk has to understand.
You answer the two questions. We translate them into the right appointment, name the reserves, write any stipulation the appointment needs, and read the whole thing back to you in plain words before anyone signs. You do not have to learn the vocabulary to get the outcome right.
If you want the full picture of what an LPA contains, the complete guide to lasting power of attorney in England and Wales covers everything from the two types to registration and costs. If you would rather have a person prepare and check it, that is what Power of Attorney Service does.
Power of Attorney Service is a trading name of Dead Easy Legal Ltd, registered in England and Wales.