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No!
When I first started out as a clerical in HB (way back in 1987)... The LA I worked for (and al surrounding LA's) had a v. strong sense of welfare rights and advocacy. If in interview about say a non-dep moving in, you would automatically do a welfare benefits check just to ensure that people were getting all there were entitled too (and this in the days of HBS (Supplementary Benefit as IS was then known) being paid as part of the HB... This ethos stayed with most LA’s until the mid 90’s...
In part, this knowledge was also neded to award the correct 'applicable amount' or ensuring the correct 'premiums’' were awarded on the switch to IS in 1988. However, the relentless progress of IT has in large part 'de-skilled' HB officers in this wider art (though HB is now very complicated compared to HB back then, so skill sets have had to develop in other areas)... and welfare rights etc. have bitten the dust against the relentless march of 'performance targets' that HB now has to meet.
HB managers will actively criticise and question(a and WILL discipline/sack) HB assessment officers for not meeting targets, and as welfare rights are not included in targets at either a local or national level, they get overlooked (though I feel you have to excuse a benefit officer for not telling what they don't know and so blame the managers responsible for policy/training!), and if you are a temp/agency assessment officer, you might not get much actual HB training either as well as being ‘disposable’ so you only do what you are required to meet your targets, which are demanding if not on occasion impossible!)...
I was last in HB over two years ago, in appeals and what you say is not uncommon, but I was criticised even as appeals manager for taking too long in preparing submissions when all wanted was to ask them secure... What turned out to be R(H) 5/07 was my final submission and at just under 1,000 pages at submission stage the complexity of the errors made over years in the assessment process meant that there was no way I could expect an assessment officer, or even team leader to pick up on all the errors, let alone start looking at the wider welfare rights issues... The history of that appeal is however not reflected in the final decision, but at over two years to get through the process, it was not an easy one for TAS, the LA, nor Commissioners! I was reading CH/4262/2007 (para 37 onwards) and I look at things this way... If LA’s can’t get law right, in such a basic manor following years of training, provided by TAS (as was!) and the DWP, what hope is there for the scope of welfare rights and empowerment at the statutory end of things?
Sorry this was not the answer I suspect you were hoping for, but this is from successive governments obsessed with targets, losing sight of the fact that if all benefit assessments were correct, yes there would need to be more assessment/managerial staff at LA/DWP level, but les of need for acute welfare rights/advocacy service which you and many others like you provide... I might even lead to 'claimants' actually liking the LA/DWP (sorry I can't be doing with the 'customer' thing, its like when I am on a train, I am a passenger, not a customer, this comodification of services and people is silly)... Now we can't have that! Can we?
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