The Citizens Advice service helps people resolve their legal, money and other problems by providing free, independent and confidential advice, and by influencing policymakers.
Every Citizens Advice Bureau is a registered charity reliant on trained volunteers and funds to provide these vital services for local communities.
Throughout a challenging year we have continued to deliver work that benefits our clients and society. Details are provided within this report and some key achievements are listed below:
- Our membership scheme was endorsed by the Charity Commission, demonstrating that the partnership approach to quality standards between Citizens Advice and its members is of huge importance.
- We continued to influence policy makers through a number of campaigns, including highlighting the need to regulate bailiffs, school costs and post office closures.
- In September we won a top charity award for our campaign for free cash machines. Citizens Advice was presented with the ‘Changing the World’ Award for our ATM Watch campaign by 'Third Sector' magazine.
- In between the start of the FIF face-to-face debt advice programme and the end of the 2007/08 financial year, 82,410 new clients received advice from FIF advisers. Positive outcomes have so far been recorded for nearly 5,000 of these clients including £40m of debt written off and £2m of benefit gains.
- A three year partnership worth more than £1 million with the Royal British Legion was established during the year. This helped deliver a specialist service to nearly 700 clients in six months and helped achieve financial gains for clients of over £500,000.
- We were successful in securing £1.2 million from the Big Lottery Fund as part of a larger grant to the Advice Services Alliance. This will provide a range of joint support services to advice agencies across Britain.
- In November 2007 a stakeholder
review conducted by Opinion Leader for Citizens Advice found that 84 per cent of our stakeholders described themselves as complete or usual advocates for us. Our stakeholders said they regarded us as being the most effective organisation in comparison to some of our peers. We were also rated second out of 16 charities which most impressed members of parliament at the political party conferences in 2007.
- During the year Adviceguide received 7.3 million visits.
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