Agenda item

David Andy from Barnsley’s Citizen’s Advice Bureau was welcomed to the meeting and provided members with a comparison of work carried out pre pandemic, currently and what the future is expected to entail.

Members were reminded that prior to the pandemic, face to face appointments had been held on the second and fourth Wednesday of every month with a steady stream of clients wishing for help and advice for a range of issues including law, benefits, debts, employment, relationships, education and housing plus anything else they wished to discuss.

Once the pandemic had commenced in March 2020, everything had switched to remote working by delivering the advice service via telephone and online, which is how it remains to operate post pandemic.  There were three channels that clients could use in order to contact an adviser.  The first being telephone, if there is a high volume of calls then they are redirected to the national citizens advice call centre to pick up.  If it is deemed that the local office needs to deal with the issue then it is referred back.  The benefits of the phone line were that whilst there could be a delay to being answered, everyone would eventually be answered.

The secondary channel that the service provided was email advice, on the webpage there is a contact us section for clients to fill in which then automatically generated an email to CAB and clients would be responded to within 48 hours.  This provision provided those with out of operational hours jobs the ability to contact someone about an issue.  Members were informed that if further information was required then the Advisor would call the client or email back, depending on the contact information they had provided, in order to ensure the client is fully supported.

The third channel was via the CAB website which contained an advice section covering a variety of issues and links to other trusted agencies and websites.  These advice pages were updated on a monthly basis in order to ensure information was always correct.    

Members were provided with a number of statistics comparing the 9 months prior to lockdown and the 9 months from April to December 2022, in order to show the vast increase in clients assisted but to also to show that the amount of Debt managed and Benefit gain had decreased.  It was felt that the offer of telephone, email and the website was required and had been a success but it was acknowledged that there was a need for a blended service going forward with the additional offer of face to face appointments, particularly to aid people in filling in forms. 

Members were provided with a number of case studies to demonstrate the types of issues being dealt with and their positive outcomes.

Members were informed that a mixture of paid and volunteer advisers were used within the service who were all trained to resolve clients’ issues.  There were a number of benefits to using volunteers as more clients were able to be attended to and it also gave the individual volunteer the confidence to then go back into paid employment and further education, over 50% of volunteers had left to gain employment.      

There were added values of the CAB Service in that it was part of the Barnsley Food Bank Partnership and a referral agency for food parcels.  The service also had access to the fuel vouchers scheme so could help people struggling on a pre-payment metre.  A recent funding pot from Barnsley Council had been received in order to hand out shopping vouchers, for a wide range of shops, where these were deemed a better fit for the client, as opposed to food parcels, after being seen by an adviser.  Food vouchers enabled the client to buy anything they wished including dog food and fuel logs, but it was noted that there were restrictions on the vouchers being used for alcohol, gambling and tobacco. 

Members enquired as to how the fuel vouchers were distributed to clients.  In response, members were informed that a code would be generated for the client to use for a pre-payment metre and that these could not be used for someone who pays by direct debit. 

The future forecast was that the service would see an increase in demand for help and advise due to the cost of living crisis, the economy, increase in energy costs and the possibility of businesses having to downsize or close due to those pressures, impacting on a wide range of people. 

RESOLVED that thanks be given for the presentation and the hard work undertaken by the Barnsley Citizens Advice Bureau.