Corporate appointees - a bit of a rum one?

Apologies for the vagueness with this one…...if you get to the end of it, hopefully you’ll understand why I’m a little vague.

I was contacted before Xmas by an organisation working with rough sleepers/homeless in the borough. They were wanting to refer a client whose benefits (IR-ESA and PIP) had stopped a couple of months previously and where they had been unable to make any progress with the DWP. Organisation has extremely limited benefits experience/understanding. They’ve just been back in touch today….

1. They think client has capacity issues - they/he cannot get through security when they phone.

2. During one of the calls, one DWP officer did reveal the client has a corporate appointee - but would not tell the organisation who that corporate appointee is (obviously, this fits with the organisation’s own view as to the client’s capacity).

3. I suggested they wrote to the relevant benefits centre to ask for the corporate appointee’s details, which they did - but that letter has gone unanswered. Of course, the client doesn’t have any benefit letters, so they were taking a punt on which benefit centre it might be when they wrote.

An LA social services dept. is the likeliest candidate for being corporate appointee - but it seems the client is so vague as to his address history it’s difficult to narrow down to a few possibilities so as to make it worth making some phone calls to these.

It’s a bit of a logjam at present; the benefits issues are almost certainly the result of the corporate appointee having lost contact with the client and so being unable to respond to DWP correspondence or the corporate appointee failing in its responsibilities (my experience of corporate appointees tells me that possibility isn’t a remote one). Whatever, the way to make progress with this is by identifying who the corporate appointee is - how would you go about forcing DWP to reveal who this is without knowing the appropriate benefit centre to correspond with? Who would you write to?

The other possibility would be to attempt to replace the current appointee with another - but that is going to be a much more difficult and longer process even assuming that a) someone can be found to take on that role and b) the current appointee isn’t one of the bodies/persons named under para. (2) of reg. 57 of the UC etc (Claims and Payments) Regs 2013 (or reg. 33 the 1987 Regs.)

Thoughts?

ETA: am I overcomplicating things? Would a SAR cut the knot? The identity of the corporate appointee isn’t protected data (i.e. the claimant has a right to know/be informed who it is) - would that do it?

That information can be accessed by a SAR as you can see from the following
“Customer Information System (CIS): the information held about you -
To help you understand the information provided in response to your right of access request”.

However it would only take the phone agent 2 minutes to look up the appointee details which are stored under the Relationships tab on CIS Searchlight.
I have used this software previously and if the agent is satisfied with the clients identity then the appointee details should be released.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1110332/customer-information-system-the-data-held-about-you.pdf

This seems exactly the sort of problem that the DWP’s ACSSL team should be able to resolve - vulnerable claimant with an urgent problem

I think this is nationwide, and not just a Scottish service?

This now sorted.