No auditable records infrastructure for guardianship and deprivation-of-liberty decisions

The Court of Protection makes life-controlling decisions (property, medical treatment, liberty) for ~200,000+ people under deputyship, largely in private; the DoLS backlog holds ~124,000 people awaiting authorisation of their confinement; and the OPG's supervision of deputies relies on annual self-reports. Records of who decided what, when, on what evidence are fragmented, non-standardised and effectively unauditable by families: the conditions in which abuse persists (the book's conservatorship analysis: transparent immutable decision-records deter abuse by making conservators' actions discoverable). Transparency pilots opened hearings to reporters but left the records layer untouched.

People under guardianship are the least able to contest bad decisions; their protection depends entirely on records others keep. Tamper-evident decision-trails, auditable by families and inspectors without publishing private details, would deter the abuses the current opacity invites, in a system already years past its legal capacity.

An auditable decision-records standard for deputyship and DoLS/LPS cases: standardised, tamper-evident logs of decisions, evidence and authorisations, family-accessible with privacy-preserving disclosure (prove a decision was authorised without exposing the file), piloted with one region's OPG caseload alongside the post-Supreme-Court LPS redesign.

// Build together: Counterparty: Office of the Public Guardian (one region's caseload) alongside the LPS redesign; records are privileged, not public.

life-controlling decisions for a vast, least-able-to-contest population rest on unauditable records inviting abuse, but the fix is a novel build with no dated trigger forcing it.