Do you support people who lack mental capacity to manage their financial affairs?

I have been struggling with this lately. We have started refusing all referrals where capacity has been assessed as lacking in relation to financial decisions, after a series of complicated and stressful cases where I ended up not being to achieve a great deal due to the client’s inability to instruct me or provide the required information. Not ideal and I obviously don’t like to turn people away who need help, but it just isn’t suitable for the service I work on it seems.

The problem is where else do people go? Many clients don’t have an appropriate person to be an appointee. They can get a corporate appointee but as I understand it in my area (happy to be corrected on this!), they don’t help people actually apply for benefits, e.g. doing a PIP form and they don’t want to take people on who have debts. However debt services wont take them on either.  I do debt work in my role as well as benefits and I can understand why. It also takes months for the referral to get through to the appointeeship service and get up and running so I am quite often getting referrals from social workers to ‘help the client in the meantime’.

Interested in how/whether others support clients who lack capacity for financial decisions, and where else do they get help in your area?