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

The Court of Protection makes life-controlling decisions on property, medical treatment and liberty for more than 200,000 people under deputyship, largely in private. The deprivation-of-liberty backlog holds around 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; transparent, tamper-evident decision records deter abuse by making a deputy's actions discoverable. Transparency pilots opened hearings to reporters and left the records layer untouched.

People under guardianship are the least able to contest bad decisions, and 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 deprivation-of-liberty cases: standardised, tamper-evident logs of decisions, evidence and authorisations, family-accessible with privacy-preserving disclosure that can prove a decision was authorised without exposing the file, piloted with one region's OPG caseload alongside the post-Supreme-Court 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 population least able to contest them rest on unauditable records, and the fix is a novel build with no dated trigger.