Estate Planning Specialist Reviews Every UK Power of Attorney Route, From Doing It Yourself to Solicitors Charging Up To £500 a Document, and Reveals What She'd Actually Recommend

By Helen Ashworth •Estate Planning •Updated 2 July 2026 •👁 8,742 •📖 4 min •★★★★★

My name is Helen Ashworth. For over 32 years I worked in probate and estate planning, much of it inside high-street solicitors’ practices, preparing Powers of Attorney.

And I've never been more frustrated with this system.

Every week I hear about people in their late sixties, seventies and eighties who are stuck in the same impossible situation.

For decades there have only ever been two real options, and both of them are bad ones.

You can do it yourself. The form is free to download from the government.

But it's a minefield, and one wrong tick gets the whole thing rejected.

Or you can pay a high-street solicitor, who'll want £420 to £474 a document including VAT, and well over £1,400 for a couple's full set.

To fill in that exact same free form for you.

A tricky form on one side, or a small fortune on the other. So most people end up doing nothing.

They put it off. They tell themselves they'll sort it next year.

They tell themselves their husband or wife could simply step in.

But they couldn't. I watched it for thirty-two years.

A stroke, a fall, a diagnosis, and the wife of forty years is suddenly locked out of the joint account.

The bank freezes everything. The family can't pay the carers.

And a judge they've never met decides who controls the money, because the one document that would have stopped it was never signed in time.

Twenty minutes and £92 would have prevented it.

That is what kept me up at night for three decades.

So when I retired, I decided to do something about it.

I reviewed every Power of Attorney route in the country, tested on my own clients, over six months.

Here's what I found.

Doing it yourself, direct with the government

First, the one fee nobody escapes: it costs £92 a document to register a Power of Attorney with the government.

That's the same £92 whether you do it yourself, use a solicitor, or use anyone else. It's a government charge, not a service fee.

Keep that number in your head, because it matters in a moment.

The form itself is free to download. But it was written by lawyers, for lawyers.

Eighteen pages, and another twenty-three pages of notes explaining how to fill them in.

There are eight little things on that form that look obvious to me after 32 years and aren't obvious to anyone else.

The order everyone has to sign in.

Who is and isn't allowed to be your witness.

Who is and isn't allowed to sign the part that confirms you understand what you're doing.

How you word the bit about whether your chosen people can act on their own or only together.

Getting the dates in the right sequence. Making sure your name is written exactly as it appears on your passport.

Small things. Any one of them, wrong, and the whole application comes back.

I know how many of these end up rejected and shoved in a drawer.

In 2024 the government rejected 133,760 of these applications. That's nearly one in every ten sent in.

Roughly a third of them, about 44,000 people, simply got the signing order wrong.

Two ticks in the wrong order, on a form that costs £92 to get wrong.

And the rejection letter takes around four months to arrive.

Four months in which a person can have a stroke or a fall and lose the ability to sign.

If that happens, the form can never be put right, and the family is left going to court just for the right to manage their own relative's money and care.

Thousands of pounds in fees. Months of waiting.

The DIY route is free until it isn't.

High-street solicitors

Solicitors’ published fees typically run from £420 to £474 a document, including VAT.*

It adds up fast. A couple who want the full set, both document types each, four documents in all, are quoted £1,400 or more.

That's the number that makes people shut the drawer and put it off another year.

The work is good. I won't pretend otherwise. The practices I worked in were good ones.

But after 32 years I can tell you exactly what you're paying for.

The form is the government's form, the same free one anyone can download. Nobody drafts a special private version; there isn't one.

The hour it takes to check it properly costs the practice about £40 in wages.

The rest of it pays for the building on the high street.

The reception. The secretary. The professional indemnity insurance. The business rates.

A Power of Attorney is not a £500 legal problem. It's a 20-minute form that someone needs to fill in carefully and check properly.

Often, the whole high-street model is built on making a simple thing feel frightening enough that you'll pay a solicitor's rate to do it for you.

It doesn't make your Power of Attorney one bit more legally valid. It just costs more.

The gap nobody filled

This is the part that genuinely makes me angry, looking back.

For thirty-two years I watched ordinary people forced to choose between a free form they couldn't safely complete and a bill for hundreds of pounds they couldn't justify.

And the maddening thing is that the work in the middle, the bit that actually matters, is small.

It's one careful hour.

Someone who knows the form sitting down and checking the right people have signed, in the right order, in the right places, before it ever goes near the government.

That one hour is the difference between a form that's accepted first time and one of the 133,760 that get rejected.

It is the entire value a £500 solicitor adds.

And for decades, nobody offered just that hour, on its own, at a sensible price. You either bought the whole expensive package, or you got nothing and took your chances.

So the obvious question is: why did nobody simply do the checking, properly, for a fair price?

As it turns out, somebody finally has.

Keystone Estate Planning: £89 a document, with a Free Will worth £59 included

This is the one that surprised me.

When I first heard there was a service doing exactly the checking I'd just described, for £89 a document, I was sceptical.

After 32 years you assume anything that cheap must be cutting the corner that matters.

So I did what I'd do with any service: I opened up their process and put it through three of my own cases.

They use the same official government forms I worked with for years, one for your property and money, one for your health and care.

The exact documents the government issues.

Let me be blunt, because the doubt is the thing that stops people.

The document Keystone produces is not a cheaper version of the solicitor's document. It is the same document.

The same official government form, registered the same way, just as legally valid.

There is no "budget" version and "premium" version. There is one legal document, and you are simply choosing whether to pay a solicitor's hourly rate to fill it in for you.

What you're paying Keystone for is the checking.

Before anything is sent off, a professional reads your answers and checks that the right people have signed in the right order and the right places before you send it off.

The same careful hour a solicitor bills you a fortune for.

I tested three cases: a recently-widowed neighbour, my own mother, and a friend whose form had already been rejected once before.

All three came back from the government accepted on the very first try.

I rang their support line, half-expecting a call-centre script. Instead I got a real person, here in the UK, who knew this paperwork inside out.

After 32 years I can tell when someone actually understands it. They did.

Then there's the cost.

£89 a document, for the same form a solicitor charges £400 or more to fill in.

Add your second document and it's 25% off. And every person gets their own free Will included, normally £59. A couple gets two.

The second document most people put off for another decade, thrown in for nothing.

And you don't pay a penny to begin.

You start the form free, answer the questions in your own time, and only pay at the very end, once you've been all the way through and seen exactly what you're getting.

If it's not for you, you've lost nothing but a few minutes.

I looked into who's behind it.

It was founded by a woman called Caitlin, after her parents were quoted over £1,400 by a solicitor for their Powers of Attorney.

Same official forms. Same legal result. She knew there had to be a simpler, cheaper way. So she built one.

Three cases, all registered first time.

They did the same careful work I watched done in solicitors’ practices for 32 years, for a fraction of what those practices charged.

The feedback was the same, over and over: "Why didn't someone tell me about this sooner?"

What I hear from real people

My recommendation

After 32 years preparing these documents, here's what I tell everyone who asks.

If you have a legal background and you're genuinely confident you can get all eight of those little things right, doing it yourself is fine.

It's £92 a document and the form is free. Just be honest about the odds. Nearly one in ten forms gets rejected.

If money is no object and you want a meeting in a solicitor's office, the high-street route is fine.

You're paying for the building more than the legal work, but the work will be done properly.

But if you're like most people I worked with, who can't justify hundreds of pounds a document in solicitor fees, can't afford to lose £92 to a wrong tick, and can't bear the thought of their family going to court just to look after them, start with Keystone.

Here's the honest way to look at it.

Everyone pays the government the same £92 a document to register, whoever fills the form in. The only real choice is what you pay on top of that to get your document done properly:

Look at that last line again. The Will they include is worth £59.

Take that off, and you're paying barely £30 to have your document prepared and checked by someone who does this all day. A solicitor charges £400 or more for the same form.

And you can start for free and only pay at the end.

I did it for my own mother. She's 84, stubborn as they come.

She tried the DIY route in 2019, got rejected, and gave up.

She did it through Keystone in 2023, and both documents were accepted in eleven weeks.

"Should've done it this way the first time," she told me last month.