It was with some optimism when, in September 2010, we learnt that the Office of the Public Guardian was reviewing its panel of deputies after 10 years.

The aim, according to the OPG, was to revitalise the panel to ensure that it represented the many different types of vulnerable people who required the OPG to appoint deputies to manage their financial affairs. With over 10 years’ experience of specialising in providing private client services for the Muslim community in particular, we completed an application setting out our unique selling points.

Disappointingly, the OPG informed us that we were not selected for the panel. Hoping to learn from the experience, I requested a copy of how the application had been assessed. I then learned to my dismay that the OPG had decided that, rather than reviewing each application, they would cut out all the hard work and knock out all the applications that failed to ‘self-assess’ themselves the highest marks.

Essentially, those applicants who said that they were great at everything went through to a final round and were properly reviewed, whereas those who were, let us say, more modest - but could bring real specialism and unique skills to the panel – were eliminated without even a second glance.

You would have thought that, given that the whole process took five months and there were only 600 applications to assess, the OPG could have done a better job of reviewing those applications.

Maybe next time, alas. Only another decade to wait.

Haroon Rashid, I Will Solicitors, Erdington, Birmingham