Housing Benefits Still Shit

Things aren't going so well for Lisa Black. Not only did she make a complete twat of herself at my employment tribunal last year she is also failing to lead the Housing Benefits service out of its inability to get its sums right.

Last February I wrote about how NCC had the worst accuracy scores for Housing Benefits processing in the whole of the East Midlands.

That concerned figures for 2007. Now the Audit Commission has stated that things are getting worse, saying in a progress report to the Council's Audit Committee -

"We found a higher number of errors in the processing of individual claims than in
previous years, although the overall effect on the amount of subsidy due to the Council
was small. We will be discussing with officers why the number of errors in our samples
has increased."

The thing is, NCC's internal audit service reported on Housing Benefits' chronic inaccuracy record to the Audit Committee last February, as I wrote about here.

And yet the Audit Committee seems to have been satisfied with a glib assurance that -

"...quality control errors in individual benefit claims’ processing, highlighted during the audit, were being addressed through joint working between officers and the Audit Commission..."

Surely somebody high up should be taking responsibility for this?