What bureaux do

What citizens advice bureaux do
Your local CAB can help you in lots of different ways.  Bureaux give free, confidential, impartial and independent advice on a wide range of subjects, including:

• Benefits – questions about entitlements, support with applications and appeals against unfair decisions 
• Debt and money advice – how to manage your debts, improve your financial situation and maximise your income
• Work-related problems – questions about terms and conditions, dismissal, redundancy, intimidation and unfair dismissal 
• Consumer issues – everything from broken kettles to difficulties with gas and electricity suppliers 
• Relationships – issues relating to splitting up, children, and bereavement 
• Housing – your rights through to homelessness.

Bureaux provide a quality-assured information and advice service based on a unique, comprehensive online information system called Advisernet.  This service empowers people to take control and make complex decisions that will improve their life.  
  
Not just a signpost
Some people think that bureaux are only a signposting organisation, putting people in touch with other services that are better placed to help than the local CAB.  But there’s a lot more to our work than that.  Around 65% of bureaux’ workload is giving advice, as opposed to signposting or providing a listening ear – and 25% is negotiation. ­
 
Scottish bureaux saw well over 200,000 new clients in 2006/7 alone – and many more people who trust the CAB service and came back to us for further help as and when they needed it. 
 
Delivering advice that’s needed
Bureaux are versatile, responsive organisations that provide a range of services targeted to meet local needs. 
 
For example, in addition to the comprehensive advice and information service that all bureaux offer, many bureaux have specialist advisers who have expert knowledge of particular subjects like money advice, welfare benefits and housing. 
 
Bureaux across Scotland also run projects for groups of people that have particular advice and information needs – for example, kinship carers, people whose lives have been affected by cancer, migrant workers, people with disabilities.    
  
Working for change
As well as providing help to people that need it with particular problems, bureaux feed anonymous information to Citizens Advice Scotland (CAS) so that it can be used in local and national social policy work.

If you would like to know the kinds of problems that people brought to Scottish bureaux in 2006/7, download a statistics factsheet here.