When questioning (company was insistent that all legal boxes be ticked) an FOI about an organisations failure to base its operations on formal weather reports, as required by regs, was told all you need to do is ring "Joe" and ask him to look out the window.

Well, if you didn't think ICAO were an embarrassing joke you should now.

I've seen both sides of the coin on this. Some ground staff when asked about weather on the ground didn't know east from west or how to read a windsock. On the other hand, a lot of AROs, UNICOM operators are very experienced pilots themselves who can competently provide an accurate appraisal of the local weather.
One of our operations was concerned about liability and for this reason we imposed a rule that if a pilot asked for wx we had to advise "not qualified".

I believe it is also not clear if a person can read directly off an approved weather feed unless they are a trained observer. The BoM explained that although the source was approved there still needs to be an ability to detect obvious errors in the data.