They promised to protect everything you worked for. Did they?

You did everything right. You took advice, paid for proper planning, and thought your family was protected. You weren't.

You paid for it. The documents arrived. You felt the matter was settled.

Then a family member needed care. The local authority ran a means test. And the assets you believed were protected turned out not to be.

The protection you were sold may never have been real. That is not just a disappointment. It may be fraud.

What you need to know about estate planning companies

Estate planning companies are entirely unregulated. They are not solicitors. They are not regulated by the SRA. They carry no mandatory professional indemnity insurance and there is no ombudsman. If things go wrong, there may be no route to redress from the company at all.

The person who sold you the package was typically a commission-based salesperson with no legal qualification. The advice they gave you came from someone with a financial interest in the sale and no duty of care toward you. What they told you was sales copy dressed as legal guidance.

Many of these companies have since changed name, restructured, or disappeared.

The care home fee problem

The central promise of most packages was care home fee protection, usually through a property trust or family protection trust that was supposed to take your home outside the means test.

The problem is the deprivation of assets rule. Local authorities can look back over your financial history with no fixed time limit. If property was transferred at a time when you could reasonably have foreseen needing care, the authority can treat it as still available. The trust does not protect it. In many cases, the promise of care fee protection through a property trust was never realistic. This is not a legal technicality. It is a fundamental flaw in the product that was sold to you.

What this can actually cost you

• CGT becomes payable on gains in the value of assets from the date they were put into the trust, not from death. This can produce a substantial unexpected tax bill.
• Putting your home into trust almost always means losing the £175,000 main home inheritance tax allowance available when a main home passes to a direct descendant.
• Local authorities have no fixed lookback period and are increasingly pursuing families for deliberate deprivation of assets. More than 1,000 families were pursued in the three years to 2025.
• Trusts can be very difficult and expensive to unwind. In some cases former trustees have continued to charge fees for their signatures years after the original firm closed.
• If you need to sell the property, you may need trustee consent, which can be difficult or impossible to obtain.

What the typical package included

Most packages covered some combination of a property or family protection trust, Lasting Powers of Attorney, will drafting, debt protection structures, and inheritance tax planning. Total costs typically ran from £3,000 to £10,000 or more.

Lasting Powers of Attorney are legitimate documents. But registering them directly through the Office of the Public Guardian costs a few hundred pounds. Estate planning companies routinely charge multiples of that figure for the same documents.

Where a solicitor was involved

Some companies used the involvement of a solicitor as a selling point. In most cases that solicitor was drafting documents for the company, not advising you independently. They were not your solicitor.

But where a solicitor was involved in your matter, whether as the company's legal partner or as an independent adviser you later consulted, and they failed to warn you about the limits of the protection you had paid for, there may be a professional negligence claim against a regulated professional. That is a route to recovery the estate planning company itself cannot provide.

Does any of this apply to you?

You paid thousands for a plan that was supposed to protect your home. A local authority has since run a means test and included those assets anyway. Or you are now questioning whether the protection was ever going to work.

You tried to do the right thing. You were trying to look after your family. The people who sold you this plan knew that. They used it.

Time matters

Claims here are subject to time limits, but the clock often starts from when the problem became apparent, which may be when the local authority ran its assessment, not when the documents were signed. If you have recently found out the protection does not work, do not assume it is too late.

The protection was supposed to be there when you needed it. Now that you need it, it is not. That is not something you have to accept.