Citizens Advice Bureaux

Lord Phillips of Sudbury Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, the noble Lord has confirmed the view I have always held that in every Chief Secretary there is a warm-hearted person trying to get out. It has come out this afternoon in a debate in which I judge the noble Lord has done the House a service, and I congratulate him on that.

I have never seen a speakers list that is a better list for the Whips’ Offices, particularly for the Conservative Whips’ Office, of the usual suspects—that is excluding the right reverend Prelate, of course—so there is some interest in this. I have a little history on this, so I can hardly avoid being a usual suspect. I go back a long way. In the early 1960s, as a rookie in the Conservative research department, I worked with the late Lord Barber to produce a pamphlet on consumer protection that drew attention to the parlous state of citizens advice bureaux and the desirability from the point of view of the Government of encouraging and fostering them. Happily, that has happened, and the movement has grown significantly in the intervening period.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

Does my noble friend Lord Newton remember—I nearly said “the late lamented”—Mr Vaughan, who I seem to remember attempted, as a Conservative Minister, to make massive cuts in the CAB and lost the argument and his position as a result?

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

I have some recollection of that, but I do not want to go into other people’s grief on this occasion. However, I am pleased to take the intervention from my former constituent, my noble friend Lord Phillips of Sudbury.

I was involved with that pamphlet, and later, as a junior DHSS Minister, I remember a lot of contact with CABs. I used to go back to the department and say, “Why are our leaflets so much worse than theirs?”. Our explanatory leaflets were not good, but we got better at them. Of course, I had a lot of contact with local CABs in Braintree and Witham.

The noble Lord made one of the key points, which is that CABs were the big society in action before the phrase was ever invented. We need to bear that in mind in talking about CABs tonight. The fact is that if citizens advice bureaux did not exist, the Government would have to invent them against the background we have at the moment. In my judgment, at present that need is not diminishing but growing. I do not dispute the need for difficult decisions about public expenditure or the fact that they are going to cause pain to some degree for everybody because of the situation we are in, and I am not seeking to debate the priorities, although I have doubts in one or two areas. That is not today’s subject. The fact is that a lot of relatively poor, relatively vulnerable people will be and are being affected by these changes. They are affected by changes in the Welfare Reform Bill, the Localism Act and, not least, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, which we are about to go into detail on.

I am not going to go on much longer, but I have one letter from the Cambridge CAB, which is a page and a half long. I will quote three or four sentences. Sentence one:

“We have already had to withdraw desperately needed specialist help to people with mental health problems because of the loss of County funding”.

Sentence two:

“As you know, many CABx are already in the situation where they cannot afford to keep going”.

The last two sentences:

“You have probably seen much evidence from Citizens Advice and individual CABx about our role as Legal Aid advisers. The proposed scrapping of most of the Legal Aid budget next year will result in the loss of most of our specialist debt, benefit and housing advisers”.

Those words would be echoed by a lot of others, including law centres such as the Mary Ward Legal Centre in Camden.

I ask my noble friend not to give us all the answers this afternoon, but to take account of the fact that there is real concern here, real need, and to respond in as constructive a way as possible.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, for initiating this debate, and as others have said I commend those who have spoken and look forward to those who have still to speak. The noble Lord rightly said that we must have a joined-up review. I think that that is crucial. The noble Lord, Lord Newton, said: “If CABs didn’t exist, government would have to invent them”. That is a sentence that my noble friend of 20 years has taken straight out of my script.

My noble friend Lord Thomas stated a key statistic—that 35 per cent of those going to CABs are totally unaware and lacking in understanding of the legal problems surrounding them. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle talked, rightly, of rural poverty. The noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, said that 98 per cent of the population have heard of CABs. Is there another institution in our entire society of which that is true?

[A noble Lord]

The National Trust.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

Yes. Then the noble Lord, Lord Bach, himself came out with that striking statistic that civil legal aid will drop for the CABs from £28 million to £5 million if the cuts go ahead as planned.

I state my own interest in CABs, in that I was for two decades solicitor to what was the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux, and my firm still does a lot of work for it. I also acknowledge instantly to my noble friend the Minister that this must be a very difficult debate to respond to, because we are all on the one side and passionately so and will not be put off, and she has to answer this.

Of course, as a coalition Government we have had to do very unpopular things and all parts of public expenditure have been hit. The general message tonight is clear—that this is a false economy that we are engaged upon. It is manifestly clear to anybody who has had anything to do with the CAB movement that what it does is—as one noble Lord said—to prevent much greater problems downstream. We have had various statistics quoted as to how much is saved by £1 that is spent via the CAB. I heard a figure of £9 being saved downstream for every £1 saved upstream in equipping CAB advisers to help people with debt. What greater problem is going to confront us in the next two or three years than debt? None, I suggest. How parlous are the circumstances of people trammelled in debt? As the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner, said, they have loan sharks swimming all around them. I have to be honest that it is a mystery, even with the intense difficulties of running a budget in these times, as to why we are cutting the bone—this is not the flesh, it is the bone of citizens advice.

CABs are in a way a national legal service. They are the nearest thing that we have to the NHS. It is interesting to remember that the first legal aid Act in 1949 had a provision in it allowing for the establishment across the countries of advice centres. The reason why that was not implemented was that the CAB movement took wing after the Second World War and it was instantly clear that they would provide all over the country the sort of citizen help that could have been provided at vastly more expense, with vastly more bureaucracy by the state, under the 1949 Act.

I feel compelled to say that there is a sort of cynicism, wholly unintentional but none the less real, about this Parliament which legislates as if there is no tomorrow. I looked up a statistic before I came here—in 2007 and 2008, we legislated 28,773 pages of new statute law. That is an average for each year of 14,386 pages, and that is without the circulars and all the rest that comes in the wake. That affects citizens of all sorts and all conditions, and one of the interesting phenomena of the development of the CAB movement has been that it is no longer just for the poor and deeply disadvantaged. More and more of our fellow citizens have to resort to the CABs to get advice on increasingly complicated legal jungles—quite as complex, I may say, as the tax system.

The big society point that has been made by so many noble Lords needs emphasising. If the Government are serious about the big society, and they are, then there is no more powerful manifestation of it than the typical CAB. It is not just about the nearly 400 full-time CABs; there are 3,300 part-time CABs operating from doctors’ surgeries, libraries and town halls—you name it. Those 3,300 are all manned by volunteers who come from a complete slice of the local population. They are the most catholic voluntary organisation in every town in this land of ours. They offer an availability to people who would otherwise be afraid, for example, of going to a solicitor to get advice. The reason is that they do not have the fear of fees there, which I am afraid is all too present with solicitors, and there is no sort of cultural problem. People do not feel at a disadvantage crossing the threshold of a CAB because they know from friends and acquaintances that they will be treated in a friendly and informal way. I am not for a minute saying that they would not be treated the same in a solicitor’s office, but we are talking about perception.

We cannot exaggerate the importance of this trust. We have had a Localism Bill, for goodness’ sake, and this is the apogee of practical localism. Given the empathy between CABs and their local populations, they get to parts that no one else reaches. I maintain that we really cannot make some of the cuts now intended, because I believe that the reverberations of those cuts will be profound. We will face, and are already facing, social pressures and strains in the wake of the economic crisis, which I fear is going to get much worse. It is precisely at this time that we need to shore up those institutions which sustain, support and give solidarity among our fellow citizens, right across the board.

I appreciate that the Minister is under strict limits as to what she can say in winding up, let alone what she can concede. However, perhaps she can at least take back to the Government the fact that this small number of Peers, late on a Thursday, were unanimous in their belief—I am sure that I can speak for those to come—that the CAB movement is a pearl beyond price, especially at this time, and that to damage it is to act in a self-damaging and counterproductive way.

I will end with a quote from that great old 17th-century philosopher, Hobbes, because down the ages, as we all know, ring plangent pleas from the populace to help them out of the thickets of the law, from Utopia through the Levellers and down to our time, with Mr Justice Darling and his wonderful remark about the law being available like the Ritz. Hobbes said:

“The safety of the people requireth … that justice be equally administered to all degrees of people; that is, that … poor and obscure persons, may be righted of the injuries done them”.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Baroness Wilcox)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, for securing this debate. As former chair of the National Consumer Council, where we did a lot of work for consumers, including disadvantaged consumers, chairman of the National Federation of Consumer Groups, which is the grass-roots organisation, and former president of the trading standards administration, the plight of consumers is very close to my heart. The need for more and more advice in these complex and worrying times has been evidenced here tonight.

The noble Lord, Lord Young, almost said just ditto, and so could I. He has to speak for the Opposition, and I must respond for my coalition Government and be practical and report to the House what I can. The big society is about putting more power into people's hands—a massive transfer of power from Whitehall to local communities. Voluntary, community and social enterprises are, we believe, central to that vision, because they act as a mechanism for people to come together to act on a given cause and provide a voice to individuals or groups who might not otherwise be heard. Sometimes those transitions are more difficult than we think they will be.

In response to my noble friend Lord Phillips of Sudbury, I say that our vision is for the sector to play an even more influential role in shaping a stronger sense of society and improving people's lives to give them a huge range of new opportunities to shape and provide innovative bottom-up services where expensive state provision has failed. We have already pledged £470 million over the current spending period to help the sector build capacity, including a £107 million transition fund, which has been referred to tonight, to support voluntary organisations that deliver public services.

In response to the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, and my noble friend Lord Newton on funding for CABs, I say that although the transition fund has ended, the Government are acutely aware that the voluntary sector still faces challenges to its funding streams at both the national and local level, especially those organisations involved in the provision of free advice services.

On 21 November, the Government announced that we had set aside £20 million to support the sector in the short term, as well as that we would be conducting a review to consider the longer-term environment of both funding and demand and how the Government can play a role in that. The review, which has already begun, will conclude early next year. That is all I can say about the review at this time.

To date more than 1,000 organisations have benefited from the funding we have provided, including 45 citizens advice bureaux.

To the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, in response to the question on legal aid and the transition fund, I say that the Government recognise the important role that not-for-profit organisations such as citizens advice bureaux do in delivering advice services at the local level. We are working with the sector, and across government, to ensure that the implementation of government reforms helps to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of advice services available to the public. The Government will be providing, as I said, additional funding of up to £20 million in this financial year to help achieve that.

Many people, including my noble friend Lord Newton—and in fact every speaker, I think—would say that the Citizens Advice service is already the big society in action: a respected brand, independent of Government, served by a network of volunteers, which people really trust. That is why my department has been consulting on ways in which Citizens Advice might play an even stronger role in providing consumer advocacy.

We are thinking of bringing together the powers and duties currently wielded by Consumer Focus, with its long-standing expertise and experience of helping people on the front line, to make an even bigger difference for consumers. The review, as we have said, concludes early next year, and especially after tonight I am mindful of the urgency and will reflect that back.

As a Government we are committed to ensuring that people have continued access to good-quality, free and independent advice in local communities, and that is why, as I have said before, on 21 November we announced the funding to the advice service fund. This will support the not-for-profit advice service providers to deliver essential services. This fund will focus on debt, welfare benefits, housing, and employment in the short term. A review to look at funding and the demand for advice services—

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

Could my noble friend tell the House who will administer that £20 million? Who will decide where it goes?

[Baroness Wilcox]

I will try to answer the questions as I go along, because, first, that means noble Lords do not have to wait for me to write the answer, and secondly I can try to fit them into what I am saying so that it has some kind of flow. But more than likely I will not get it right and will wish I had not started this way. I will try to continue. The noble Lord will get his advice.

The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, spoke about the policy to protect the vulnerable. The advice sector review is seeking the input of a wide range of advice sector stakeholders, including national and local advice organisations, representative bodies, funders and other organisations that have an influential role in this sector. Continual provision of services to vulnerable consumers will be at the centre of this review, and I hope that this reassures the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, that we are looking at it.

I am pleased that my department continues to support the national umbrella bodies that support the local bureaux, but the same cannot be said of local authorities. In a number of areas, the delivery of services by local bureaux has been seriously affected by local authority spending cuts, despite clear guidance from central government that voluntary organisations should not be seen as a soft target by them.

The current financial climate is such that all avenues must be explored in finding efficiencies and unlocking savings, and because of their experience, creativity and closeness to communities, voluntary groups can frequently deliver them.