The pitch was simple. Transfer your home into a trust, and it cannot be taken to fund care fees. Your family keeps what you worked for. It was presented as legally sound, reliably effective, and well worth the fees charged. For thousands of families, the promise turned out to be wrong.
What was promised
Property trust arrangements designed to protect against care home fees were sold widely across the UK for many years. The message was consistent: by transferring your home into a trust structure, you create a legal barrier between your property and any future care funding assessment. When the care assessment comes, the house is outside what gets counted. Your family inherits it rather than it being swallowed by care costs.
Advisers and estate planning companies presented this as reliable and tested. Some offered written guarantees. Many produced polished materials explaining exactly how it would work and what it would save. The fees charged, often several thousand pounds, were framed as a modest price for the certainty being purchased.
The rule that was not explained
A local authority assessing care funding does not just look at what someone owns on the day of the assessment. It can go back through their financial history and look at what they used to own. If it decides that assets were moved specifically to reduce a care fees liability, it can treat those assets as if they were never transferred. The Care Act 2014 gives local authorities that power, and they use it.
This is known as the deliberate deprivation rule, and it has been part of the legal framework for a very long time. It is not obscure. It is not a recent development. Any adviser with proper knowledge of how care funding assessments work would have known about it before recommending a property trust as a means of protection. Many advisers who sold these products either did not know about it or made a commercial decision not to explain it.
What families discovered
Families found out the truth at the worst possible time. A parent reached the point of needing residential care. The local authority carried out a financial assessment. The property transferred into the trust some years earlier was included in that assessment on the basis that the transfer had been a deliberate deprivation. The fees were assessed in full. The protection that had been paid for proved to be no protection at all.
Some families faced the additional cost of taking legal advice to contest the local authority's position. Some succeeded in those challenges. Many did not. In all cases, the outcome was fundamentally different from what the estate planning arrangement had promised, and the family bore the consequences of advice that was not fit for purpose.
What this means legally
An estate planning adviser who sells a property trust arrangement without properly explaining the deliberate deprivation rules has given advice that falls below the standard required of a competent professional. The standard does not require perfection. It requires basic honesty about how the legal landscape actually works. Failing to disclose a fundamental limitation of the arrangement being sold is not a minor gap. It is the kind of failure that professional negligence law exists to address.
When an estate planning arrangement fails to provide the protection it was sold to deliver, the question turns to who is responsible. Where the advice did not meet the required standard, and where the family suffered a financial loss as a direct result, the professional who gave the advice may be liable for that loss. These claims have been successfully pursued. Families in exactly this situation have recovered compensation through the negligence route.
The protection was the product. If the protection could not be relied upon, the product had no value from the outset.
The process starts with an independent assessment of what happened. That assessment is available free of charge through Sold Short, and it is the first step toward understanding whether you have a claim.
Sold Short connects families affected by failed estate planning arrangements with specialist professional negligence solicitors. Free review. No win no fee.
