Forget ‘efficiency savings’ – we need our specialist welfare advisers

from the guardian joepublic blog ...

... ‘Plans to replace experienced welfare rights advisers with generic benefits staff are almost laughable’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2010/aug/23/disability-welfare-rights-advisers

A bit of an unfair view of generic benefits advisers by the disability specialist I think.

I’ve long felt that the concentration on DLA / AA claims by LA units owes more to the contribution these benefits make to social services income than to any decision that these claimants are the only people who need help and advice.

A properly resourced and trained generic WRO should be able to a better job, holistically, for most clients than a silo oriented one who just does disability benefits.

The truth, I’m sure, is that any WRO does handle the WTC / CTC / JSA / ESA / HB / CTB cases anyway, so they are already generic - just too frequently only for disabled clients.

Our LA, like many others, operates a very rounded service.  We have the fairer charging team who visit home care service users to assess the charge for those services and who assist those service users to maximise their income in the usual way, helping to claim AA/DLA etc.  My colleagues here do excellent work and although they assess for charges (they are bound to do so by central government) their motivation in assisting service users is not motivated by that but by a genuine desire to help people and to try to improve the quality of their lives.  And they are very good at what they do.

We also have a specialist welfare rights service, to which I belong, who advise and assist in the usual way across the whole spectrum of social security law up to appeals to the upper tribunals.  There is a need for both of these services in any community and it is not a question of either or.  Helping people navigate their way through the benefit system and to enforce basic legal rights through the appeals system are essential to a civilized society, cannot be done on the cheap and is far too important to be an after thought in the minds of beaurocrats.