The hardest part isn’t the illness: siblings, capacity and money

In almost every family with more than one adult child, one person ends up carrying the care and the others end up carrying an opinion. Families who ring us say the illness is rarely the hardest part. The hardest part is a brother who promises to come and does not, a sister who says the money is being spent wrongly, and a parent with dementia who believes whoever spoke to her last.

The Legalities of Caring for the Elderly in the UK

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One of you does the care, the rest of you have a view

The pattern is so consistent that we can usually hear it coming in the first minute of a call. One adult child becomes the person who books the carers, sits in on the assessments, answers the phone at two in the morning and keeps the rota alive. The others contribute opinions, deadlines and occasional visits.

What surprises families is how much work the coordination is, separately from the care itself. As one daughter running her father’s rota put it to our team:

“Arranging care is basically a five, six, seven-day-in-a-row job. You cannot do it three days a week.”

That is why “I’ll take over for a bit” from a sibling who has never done it rarely lands as the gift it is meant to be. Handing over a rota takes days of briefing, and handing it back takes weeks of repair. If you are the one carrying it, you may recognise yourself in the family carers nobody counts.

Why dementia makes the disagreement so much worse

Ordinary family arguments are survivable because everyone remembers them. Dementia removes that. A parent who cannot retain the last conversation experiences each version of events as new and true, which means the last person in the room wins.

Several daughters have described the same thing to us in different words: a sibling telling their mother, repeatedly, that the daughter doing the work is spending her money or trying to put her in a home. Their mother has no way to weigh the claim against the folder of evidence, so she simply becomes frightened of the person feeding her.

The same mechanism works with promises. A sibling who says “I’m coming next weekend” to a parent with dementia has not made an appointment, they have installed an expectation that will be renewed hourly and disappointed repeatedly. One of our team said it plainly to a caller at the end of her rope: your mother has dementia, your brother promises her things, and that is what makes it worse.

Three things help, and none of them involve winning the argument:

• Do not correct your parent in the moment. Contradicting the story raises the distress without shifting the belief. Reassure, redirect, and keep the record elsewhere.
• Take the dispute out of the room. Whatever needs saying to a sibling gets said by email, not over your mother’s head in her own sitting room.
• Ask the carers to note what they see. Dated, factual daily notes are worth more than anyone’s memory, and they are neutral in a way family testimony never is.

Capacity is not a family opinion

Money and capacity arrive together. One daughter told us her brother had begun telling professionals that their mother could no longer manage her own money, which she believed was really an attempt to gain control of it. Her line was blunt: she did not lose capacity, he wants the control.

As general information, and this is a point worth putting to a solicitor rather than settling at a kitchen table, capacity is presumed unless it is shown otherwise. It is specific to a decision and to a moment, so someone may be unable to manage an investment portfolio while remaining perfectly able to decide what they eat, who visits and which carer they like. A decision other people think is unwise is not, by itself, evidence of incapacity. And a family member’s assertion is not an assessment: that comes from a suitably qualified professional, and it should be recorded.

If you want the framework carers themselves are taught, our explainer on mental capacity, the Mental Capacity Act and DoLS covers the principles in plain terms. For where family duty legally begins and ends, whether you are legally responsible for an elderly parent answers the question most siblings are actually arguing about without realising it.

Keep the money visible, and keep it separate

The single most protective thing we see families do is boring. They make the parent’s money separate, traceable and dull to look at: a dedicated account the care is paid from, one card used only for care, receipts kept even for small things, and a short monthly summary sent to every sibling whether or not they asked for it. It feels like overkill in year one. It is the reason the accusation goes nowhere in year two.

One daughter we spoke to had opened a new account purely to keep the carer payments running while a brother dragged his feet on his share. She was not being secretive, she was being organised, but without a paper trail those two things look identical from a distance. The trail is what tells them apart.

Money is also where the sibling who is furthest away reaches for the simplest answer. More than one caller has described a brother or sister defaulting to “just put her in a home”, which is the easiest option to arrange and often the most expensive one to live with. As one son said to us, once she is in a home, that life is gone.

The arithmetic is worth doing properly before anyone decides. In 2026, private self-employed carers typically charge around £18 to £25 an hour, and live-in carers booked through a platform roughly £130 to £190 a day. Agencies commonly charge £25 to £35 an hour for visits, and from about £239 a day for live-in care. One son who called us was paying an agency roughly £4,000 a month for three short double-up visits a day, and was startled to learn what that budget could buy as continuous private care instead. Private arrangements are usually cheaper, though never guaranteed to be, and the comparison is set out in our guide to whether a care home or home care costs less. If the money comes through the council, how direct payments actually work is the piece most families wish they had read first.

Powers of attorney, and the gap when nobody got round to them

Almost every difficult call on this subject contains the same sentence in some form. One daughter said it exactly: if only her mother had signed the powers of attorney five years earlier, she could have hired someone the same week.

Again as general information only, a lasting power of attorney has to be made while the person still has capacity to make it, and there are two kinds, one for property and financial affairs and one for health and welfare. They are registered with the Office of the Public Guardian. If that window closes, the route is a deputyship application through the Court of Protection, which is a careful process and takes months rather than weeks. Our page on solicitors’ fees for deputyship applications gives a sense of the cost and timescale.

Two details are worth raising with a solicitor before anything is signed, because they decide how a divided family will function later:

• Joint or jointly and severally. Attorneys appointed jointly must agree on everything. In a family that already disagrees, that can freeze a care plan completely.
• Who is actually going to do it. Where a professional deputy manages the finances, every payment and every new carer needs sign-off, and families tell us that the wait can be the thing that loses them a good carer.

If the person you care for still has capacity today, this is the week to sort it, alongside a will. Our overview of the legalities of caring for an elderly person in the UK is a starting point before you see a solicitor.

When it stops being a disagreement

Sometimes what a caller describes is no longer a family row. Blocking equipment deliveries, cancelling a care package someone depends on, changing the locks so another relative cannot get in, or isolating a parent from the rest of the family are safeguarding concerns, and they are treated as such.

If you reach that point, the practical route is your local council’s adult social care safeguarding team, plus the Office of the Public Guardian if the person you are worried about is an attorney or deputy, and a solicitor for anything contested. Councils are stretched and their safeguarding teams are triaging constantly, so make it easy for them to act: dates, what you saw rather than what you concluded, who else has witnessed it, and what you are asking for. Ask your social worker how they would prefer a concern to be worded, agree a timescale, and chase politely against that date. Families who do this get further, faster, than families who arrive angry.

Stop waiting for the absent sibling

The hardest piece of advice we give is also the most freeing. A care rota cannot be held hostage to a promise. If a sibling has said three times that they will take over and has not, plan as though they will not, and let them prove you wrong.

That means booking cover before you are desperate, trialling a carer while you still have the energy to supervise a first week properly, and giving the distant sibling defined jobs that suit distance: managing paperwork, paying invoices, researching equipment. People who feel useless become critics. People with a task tend not to.

It also means being honest about who the carer works for. Carers found through PrimeCarers are self-employed and contract with you directly, and we check identity, right to work and DBS documentation as part of onboarding.

PrimeCarers is an introductory platform and does not provide, manage, supervise or clinically assess care. Clients remain responsible for checking carer documentation, interviewing carers, checking suitability for their specific needs, and agreeing the scope of care directly with the carer.

In a divided family, that direct relationship matters, because it makes clear who is entitled to make decisions and who is simply expressing a view. If care at home has already broken down and someone is in a care home, whether to bring them back is a separate question, and we have written about when that works and when it does not.

What to do next

1. Sort the powers of attorney this month if the person you care for still has capacity, and ask a solicitor specifically about joint versus jointly and severally appointments.
2. Separate the money. One account, one card, receipts, and a one-page summary emailed to every sibling on the same date each month.
3. Start a dated log. Visits made, calls answered, decisions taken, professionals involved. Facts, not feelings, and never send it in anger.
4. Get the care covered independently of family goodwill. You can post a job describing the hours, the personality you need and the household situation, and interview carers yourself.
5. Escalate properly if it is safeguarding. Contact adult social care, put it in writing, and ask what happens next and by when.

Related reading

• Six months without leaving the house: the family carers nobody counts
• Direct payments: the money is yours, and six things nobody tells you
• The last weeks at home: what families actually ask for at the end
• The legalities of caring for the elderly in the UK
• Trouble with carers? Steps to take when problems arise