Volunteers help Citizens Advice Scotland march from strength to strength

DURING the first few months in her new job, Margaret Lynch has travelled the length and breadth of Scotland – visiting Citizens Advice Bureaux around the country.

As the chief executive of Citizens Advice Scotland, she has made it her mission to become as familiar as possible with the work done in local offices by advice workers and volunteers.

And she has been astonished by the variety of places from which the CAB offers advice – from a fancy Georgian manor house in Haddington to a Portakabin in Kinochbervie.

“I have been as far as Orkney and Shetland, to Stornoway, Aberdeen, Inverness the Black Isles, Dundee, Perth and Hawick, as well as to most offices in the Central Belt,” she says.

“It has been amazing. Every Citizens Advice Bureau reflects its local community and its is really important that it does that. If an adviser from Lanark tried to provide advice to a person from Motherwell, it wouldn’t be as effective.”

Citizen Advice Bureaux provide free advice and information to people in more than 250 locations across Scotland. Each office operates independently – with Citizens Advice Scotland operating as a focal point – providing information and suggesting solutions to problems, while collecting data about the sort of issues that people are facing.

A recent report by the Fraser of Allander Institute showed the CAB provided advice on almost 500,000 issues in the financial year 2011-12. According to Ipsos Mori research, one in five members of the public in Scotland has visited a bureau for advice in the past three years.

Although CAB and CAS have 748 paid full- and part-time staff, Lynch stresses the CAB could not operate without its army of volunteers. “I see Citizens Advice as a social movement and as a really important part of society in Scotland,” she says. “It helps people when they need it most.

“From my point of view, the most important people are the volunteers and you find that many of them are former clients. There is an esprit de corp within the offices – and that creates a sense of community. It works because the CAB is run by volunteers and the volunteers reflect the communities they serve. There are 2,400 volunteers and without them, we couldn’t carry out the work we do.”

Lynch previously worked in overseas development around the world and believes that the involvement of voluntary staff gives the CAB something special. “From my work in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the thing I really missed was that sense of everybody being involved in everybody else’s lives. This is the first example I have seen of it in Scotland and that is very special.”

Visiting centres around the country has also given Lynch a clearer idea of the sort of problems that people are facing. As the head of the CAS, it will be part of her job to feed this information back to government and to lobby for change.

The majority of cases involve concerns over benefits, debt, housing, employment and relationships.

“Very often, people come into Citizens Advice Bureaux when they have a really big problem,” says the chief executive.

The latest figures show that problems with benefits remain the biggest issue faced by people who come for advice, with 187,229 people seeking help with benefits in 2011-12.

Benefit changes have seen a fourfold increase in the number of people whose benefits have been stopped, according to information gathered by CAS. Problems with debt are on the increase – with 118,244 CAB cases involving debt over the same period.

“There is a huge problem in this country with debt. There has been a systemic change in this country in our attitude towards borrowing,” Lynch says. “I come from a working class background, where the ability to keep out of debt was seen as the mark of a good housekeeper. But then my generation got mortgages and debt became part of life.

“Something seems to have changed. It is about consumerism and materialism really driving human behaviour.”

Citizens Advice Scotland is currently campaigning against the practices of pay-day lenders that charge exorbitant rates of interest to people who need short-term loans.

If people can pay back the loans on time and quickly, then these sort of arrangements may be a useful stop-gap. However, evidence gathered by CAS suggests many people are failing to pay and end up with a downward spiral of growing debt.

The organisation that Lynch joined in July is also shaping up for a major shift in its role, which will see the service take over the functions of Consumer Focus, formerly the Scottish Consumer Council, and some functions formerly carried out by the Office of Fair Trading.

Under its new remit, CAS will provide information to governments as part of the regulated industries unit – looking at customer issues with industries such as energy, postal services and water.

“This will enable us to be more robust in investigating consumers’ concerns,” says Lynch. “It takes us beyond complaining about what things are wrong to be able to propose what policy approaches might put things right. It will enable us to ensure that issues brought to the CAB in relation to consumer issues are very closely analysed.”

Having an army of advisers on the ground means the CAB is in a perfect position to lobby for change – not as Lynch says to “campaign for the sake of campaigning” – but to reflect back to policymakers the real problems being faced by people every day.

“It is not enough to come up with short-term solutions; you have to remember the problems. That is why this joint approach is everything – it allows us to address the issues while looking at what can be changed.

“Government and politicians really trust us because everything we tell them is based on real people, real problems and a realistic analysis of what that means. People don’t trust banks, they don’t trust politicians, but they trust us.”