Citizens Advice Bureaux

Lord Bishop of Newcastle Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Newcastle]

My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Lord for securing this debate today. The future of the CAB is a hugely important matter, and I want to begin by paying tribute to the enormous contribution the CAB makes to the well-being of our society. It provides a lifeline for over 2 million people a year, but the position is becoming desperate. As we have heard, some CABs have had more than 50 per cent of their funding withdrawn. They are cutting their opening hours, cutting services and making staff redundant. Some are facing closure and shutting down altogether. To make matters worse, the coming changes in the legal aid system mean that social welfare and housing cases will no longer be eligible for legal aid, so the funding crisis for the CAB is bound to get worse and worse. And all of that is happening as the number of people seeking help with debts, benefits and homelessness has doubled in some parts of the country.

There is a triple whammy going on: local authority cuts, the end of the Financial Inclusion Fund, and the cuts to legal aid. Inevitably, it is the poorest in our society who will suffer the most. People are already struggling with the impact of job losses—that is especially true in my part of the world, the north-east—reductions in public services, rising costs of living and increasing levels of debt. The CAB network has always prided itself on being there for the people who need its services the most, but it will no longer be able to be the lifeline that so many need, and more people will have nowhere to turn when they desperately need help with their own serious problems. The irony of it is, if irony is the word, that as a volunteer-based service, the CAB provides excellent value for money and—I argue as the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, did—saves public money in the long run. It is almost as if we are cutting off our nose to spite our face. When CABs are forced to reduce their services, they lose highly skilled and dedicated volunteers and staff. That is a tragic waste and surely a false economy.

My personal experience comes from the city of Newcastle and the county of Northumberland, and it is on the latter that I want to focus the rest of my remarks. Those noble Lords who know Northumberland will know that it is a wonderfully wild, beautiful and very sparsely populated place. There are few, if any, sources of free advice, and for many people the local CAB is not just the first port of call, it is the only place where they can get free, high-quality advice. In rural counties like Northumberland, specialist advice services are few and far between and, as budgets reduce, specialist advisers are finding it harder to travel out to rural outreach centres, some of which have been successfully placed in churches and local village community halls.

Inevitably perhaps, and increasingly, new technology is being considered in order to help improve access to advice. But the trouble is that while the provision of advice by e-mail or through online websites is sometimes a realistic solution, in many parts of Northumberland people cannot even get a mobile phone signal let alone access the internet, and some of the problems people are facing are far more complex than can be dealt with in a quick e-mail. The manager of the citizens advice bureau in Alnwick said this to me:

“The trouble is that assumptions are often made that deprivation does not exist in rural areas, but our experience says otherwise. Unemployment, low pay, part-time seasonal work, limited access to childcare, poor transport links, an ageing population and the low take-up of benefits are just some of the factors which contribute to rural deprivation here. But because the numbers affected are small and scattered, or because deprivation is hidden, it is harder for rural CABs to evidence the need for services to tackle these issues”.

What is true of Northumberland is equally true of many of the more deeply rural parts of our country.

In our present financial climate, it is vital that people continue to have access to debt and welfare advice. I look forward to hearing from the Minister not only how much the work of the CAB is valued by our Government but, much more importantly, how the present insecurity and uncertainty, which are so debilitating for everybody connected with the CAB, can be ended by government action and thereby how the future of the vital CAB services in our country can be secured.