Angela Smith: The vital advice that gives hope to the desperate

FOR most people, the need to seek advice will never happen and I hope that will remain the case.

However, for some people and through no fault of their own, they find themselves in difficulty, with creditors knocking at the door or their home taken away.

Often these people are going through a terrible time, they may have lost a partner, they may have lost a job or they may have found they can’t work any more.

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It is at these times that the local advice centre comes into its own, being able to offer practical help, guiding people to a safe haven and allowing them to rebuild their lives.

My constituency is typical of many in the country where services by the Citizens’ Advice Bureau and others are provided on very tight budgets and they draw heavily on the contribution made by an army of well-trained, motivated volunteers – the original Big Society even before it became a PR slogan.

Even when the economy was in good health and employment levels at record highs, advice services played an important role in supporting individuals.

Yet, in the coming years, the OBR is forecasting that personal indebtedness will increase by £303bn by 2015, meaning that average household debt will rise to £77,309.

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Already I am informed by an advice centre in my constituency that they have seen an increase of 13 per cent in the number of people seeking help. In Barnsley, the CAB has seen an increase of 25 per cent in the level of debt they are being asked advice about, totally almost £18m last year.

At the Barnsley advice centre, they are now receiving 50 new debt-related inquiries a day and debt accounts for 60 per cent of their work – a frightening figure!

All three advice centres agree that the situation will get worse as the austerity drive by this Government gathers pace.

It is not a time, therefore, to cut funding to advice centres. And yet that is exactly what is happening. Never mind that the Financial Inclusion Fund has been reprieved (for the time being).

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Anyone familiar with the funding regimes that apply to advice centres will know that they typically sustain themselves from a number of sources.

Stocksbridge Advice Centre, which covers an isolated town seven miles from next nearest advice centre, has seen its £84,000 budget reduced to £29,000 for 2011-12 thanks to a number of decisions by the Government.

The biggest loss is the £42,000 it used to get from Yorkshire Forward.

In the eastern part of my constituency, the local independent advice centre, Chapel Green, relies on a grant from Sheffield City Council for its survival. This grant has not only been cut by 11 per cent, but it also has only received funding for six months and has been told it will then have to compete for a share of any possible further funding.

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This centre not only covers the north-east of the city but also part of the massive Parson Cross estate, where the levels of deprivation are well known. Already the centre runs on the work of volunteers and can only pay for a part-time manager.

In Barnsley, while the local Labour Council has been able to maintain the CABs funding of £195,000 for another year and the retention of the Financial Fund is helpful, there is still much uncertainty about the future. And the grant level, while it is being maintained, is still a cut in real terms when inflation is taken into consideration.

This centre, of course, not only covers a large part of the west of Barnsley, but the whole of the rest of the borough, which by any standards features high on the indices of deprivation.

In these difficult times, the Government needs to think again and to look more thoroughly at the cumulative impact on advice centres of its policies.

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The very futures of these centres are now at risk not from the cuts they are almost all facing from local authorities but because they are losing that funding on top of other funding from various sources.

While the Big Society is great slogan, it still needs funding. Volunteers are great and do a valuable job but they still need support, they still need training and that still takes money.

This Government needs to understand that if we really are all in this together then advice centres need to be sustained.

This Government also needs to understand it would be damaging to force through a centralised rationalisation of advice centre services by contracting the work out to call centres; when people are in trouble, they need the personalised and sensitive approach which comes with a face-to-face service.

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The challenge for me is clear. Are we all in this together?

If we are, and if we believe in the so-called Big Society, then don’t endanger a service valued by our communities and which they so vitally need.

Angela Smith is the Labour MP for Penistone and stocksbridge. This is an edited extract of a speech that she delivered in Parliament.