If the risks were never properly explained, the advice was never properly given.
When someone sits down with an estate planning adviser to talk about protecting their property from care fees, they are usually thinking carefully about the future, and they are trusting the person in front of them to give them an honest picture. That picture needs to include the downsides. Not buried in paperwork. Not glossed over at the end of a presentation. Explained properly, in plain language, before any decision is made.
A lot of families never got that explanation.
What the adviser was supposed to do
Any competent adviser working in this area knows that property trust arrangements designed to protect against care fees are not guaranteed. They know that local authorities can challenge transfers they consider deliberate deprivation. They know those challenges can succeed, and that the outcome depends on the specific facts. This is not specialist knowledge. It is the basic picture that anyone giving honest advice in this area is expected to understand and pass on.
If an adviser knew all of that and did not explain it clearly to the client, they did not give proper advice. They made a sale.
The difference between agreeing and understanding
Families who went ahead with these arrangements mostly signed documents, paid fees, and believed they had done the right thing. Some of them had. Others had agreed to something without being told the full story. Those two groups may have signed identical paperwork, but they are in very different positions. One made an informed decision. The other made a decision based on incomplete information.
That distinction matters. A client who was not told the real risks did not genuinely consent to the arrangement they entered into. They consented to the version of it they were presented with, which was not the complete version. That is not a valid basis for advice, and it is not something families should simply accept as the cost of trusting someone who was supposed to know better.
The standard that applied
You do not have to be a solicitor to give estate planning advice. But whoever gives it is held to the standard of a competent practitioner in that field. That standard requires an honest and accurate account of what the arrangement can and cannot do. Overselling the protection, or leaving out the circumstances in which it fails, falls below that standard regardless of whether the adviser was a solicitor, a will writer, or a specialist company.
Where that standard was not met and the family lost money as a result, a professional negligence claim is how that failure is addressed and the loss recovered.
Do not wait on this
These claims have time limits. The primary period is six years from the date the advice was given. There is also a three-year period that runs from when the family first knew or ought to have known they had a potential claim, which is often triggered by the care funding assessment that showed the arrangement had not worked.
If the arrangement has failed, or if you are starting to suspect it might, the time to get advice is now rather than later. Every month that passes is time off the clock. A free assessment through Sold Short will establish the limitation position clearly so you know exactly where you stand and what is still open to you.
A client who was not told the real risks did not genuinely consent to the arrangement they entered into. That is not something families should accept.
Sold Short connects families who received inadequate estate planning advice with specialist professional negligence solicitors. Free review. No win no fee.