Alex McLeish helps CAB’s Stirling work with food voucher scheme

PRESS RELEASE

Scotland football manager Alex McLeish helped kick-off a new initiative to provide food-vouchers yesterday for people left destitute by a failing welfare system.

Stirling Citizens Advice Bureau says it is seeing increasing numbers of clients who have no money for basic necessities, largely as a result of lengthy delays in processing welfare benefits and the virtual inaccessibility of crisis loans.

McLeish presented a cheque for £1,500 from Unity Bank to the bureau to fund the scheme.

"If I can help raise awareness of this fantastic initiaitve then how can I say no.  It's an honour to have been asked," he said. "I really take my hat off to the magnificent, selfless work they do."

The CAB has already persuaded some local stores in Stirling to accept the vouchers for food and household items (no alcohol or cigarettes can be bought, and no change can be given).  The stores which have signed up will invoice the CAB on a monthly basis for goods bought using vouchers.

Bureau manager Craig Anderson said: “We have noticed a significant increase in the number of people coming to Stirling CAB with no money for food.  The main reason appears to be the time it takes to get benefit paid since the Department of Work and Pensions adopted a call-centre model based in Middlesborough.

“It can take up to eight weeks to receive money from the date you call to claim.  In the intervening weeks people can claim a Crisis Loan, but it is often very difficult to get through to this telephone helpline due to the volume of calls.  Stirling CAB felt it was important to develop this Food Voucher Initiative to ensure that these clients who are penniless do not go hungry. “

The food voucher launch was the centre-piece of an open day at Stirling CAB that aimed to highlight increasing levels of consumer debt and the vital behind-the-scenes role the CAB service is playing in alleviating the effects.

There has been a significant increase in the amount of debt clients seeking help from Stirling CAB over the last twelve months.  In 2004/05, Stirling CAB dealt with £4,129,000 of debt; in 2005/06 it was £5,660,000; and the projected new debt for 2007/08 will top £7,000,000.

“In order to deal with this, we need adequate investment from the local authority as a key partner in alleviating hardship and poverty in Stirlingshire,” said Anderson. “Client numbers have doubled since March.  We hope to convince the council to invest in the bureau to avoid a reduction in service.  We have increased the number of volunteers from six to 52 this year, with 36 advisers graduating with certificates of competence in four weeks.  It would be a travesty if the city of Stirling did not have a CAB.”

Despite its work, Stirling CAB almost faced closure earlier this year.  “Many people assume the CAB service – because it’s such a national institution - is somehow centrally funded,” says Anderson, “but it isn’t.  Each bureau absolutely depends on a core grant from their local authority.”

Anderson and his management committee hope to convince the council that adequately investing in Stirling CAB could generate significant amounts of additional income for Stirlingshire residents by increased take-up of benefits and a reduction in outgoings for debt.  “As a general rule, we generate at least £2 for every £1 of council investment.”

The CAB, which opened in 1940, actually levers in far more than it receives in grant-aid, he insists.  “Not increasing our funding means a corresponding squeeze on our resources and a reduction on the additional money we generate for Stirling.  It would be a real own goal”.

“The bureau has added enormous value to the support we have received to date from the local authority.  This includes a one-off emergency grant of £50,000 from our umbrella body Citizens Advice Scotland to remain open. We need that money to be part of our central funding each year or we have to reduce services and probably close the door for good.” Anderson said.

Last year alone, the bureau won a combined total of over £250,000 in financial gains for clients, often through benefits or other entitlements people didn’t even know they were eligible for.  “That’s money retained in the most fragile parts of Stirling’s local economy,” points out Anderson.

The bureau also unlocks the wider CAB service’s vast range of central support services, all for the benefit of the people of Stirling, he adds.  This includes a comprehensive and constantly updated 15,000-page information system, expert legal advice, training for advisers, IT back-up.  And then there’s the influential social policy work that Citizens Advice Scotland does with both parliaments, backed up by client case-evidence obtained from bureaux like his.

“What’s more, most of our trained advisers are local volunteers,” says Anderson. “We estimate that if you had to pay these people the going rate the wage bill would come to around £173,500.”

Worse, if Stirling lost its bureau, one of the longest established in the UK, it would be just as the CAB service elsewhere is going from strength to strength.  “Across Scotland, bureaux are developing even more cost-effective services,” says Anderson, “things like financial education training for young people, home-advice for cancer patients and their families, in-court support for court users, debt advice clinics, help for migrant workers, and more.

“All in all, we lever-in money and resources, fight social exclusion, work to protect the most vulnerable - all by a mainly volunteer workforce.

“That really is a very good deal – and a very, very good return on the funding we get.”

Notes for News Editors

1. A recent Ipsos MORI survey found that 97 per cent of CAB clients praised the ‘professionalism, competency and efficiency of staff’, the provision of ‘advice, assistance and support across a range of issues’, and 96 per cent said the CAB service ‘helped people get fair treatment’.
2. The first bureaux in Scotland were established in 1939 (Stirling in 1940) as a wartime information service.  There are now 76 CAB offices across Scotland, which operate from over 200 service points, and which form the country’s largest independent advice network.
3. Consumer debt is now the single biggest issue that CABx deal with.  Last year, CABx in Scotland dealt with debt totalling over £211m.