Adults with Incapacity Act: activity between 1 January and 31 March 2009
Summary
The total number of welfare guardianship applications notified to the Commission in the first quarter of 2009 was 350. During the same period, 288 applications were granted. For Scotland as a whole, there are now substantially more private welfare guardianships granted, than where the local authority is the applicant (Table 70).
288 welfare guardianship interlocutors were received during the quarter (Figure 4) compared with 281 last quarter. The proportion of relative or carer applicants in interlocutors received during the most recent quarter is slightly higher at 66% than in the previous quarter when it was 62% (Table 71). 52% of all orders included both welfare and financial powers (Table 73). Women account for 58% of all interlocutors received in the quarter. In this quarter, 67% of women subject to welfare guardianship were over 65 years old (Table 74), the same as in the last quarter of 2008.
The proportion of orders granted for an indefinite duration continues to be very high at 70%, a slight increase from last quarter where the figure was 68%.
In 98% of orders granted, the power to determine care and accommodation (or where adult should reside) was included. The percentage of orders granted which include the power to give consent to medical treatments, research or supervise medication stands at 77% (Table 76) down slightly from last quarter where the figure stood at 82%.
The following tables relate to provisional figures for interlocutors granted.
Table 70: Numbers of local authority and private* applications granted for welfare guardianship, by local authority area, and per 100,000 population over 16, January to March 2009
*The term 'private' refers to all non local authority applications including those made by relatives, carers and solicitors.
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Table 71: Applicant status
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Table 72: Welfare guardian status
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Table 73: Type of powers sought
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Table 74: Welfare guardianship orders granted, by age and gender, Jan-Mar 09
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Table 75: Duration of orders, granted October and December 2008
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Table 76: Powers included in orders granted
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Figure 3: Welfare guardianship orders granted by quarter
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Notes on the data:
The figures for orders granted in the quarter are provisional. The Commission can experience significant delays in receiving copies of decisions made with respect to applications. We continue to work with the organisations that supply information to us to make sure this type of report is accurate in future. Population figures are projections for persons aged 16 and over, mid 2008 as published in April 2009 (General Register for Scotland).
May 2009
