Ipswich & District Citizens Advice Bureau
Campaigns
The Citizens Advice Service as an organisation helps people resolve their problems in two ways – through advice work and through bringing about policy change. We bring about policy change by using the experience of clients to show policy makers where the policies or services they provide fall short and cause problems for people. The aim of social policy work is to persuade the policy makers to make appropriate improvements to those policies or services.
Social policy work is coordinated on a local, regional and national basis. At any given time Citizens Advice is running a number of active campaigns for change on specific social issues. Citizens Advice requests evidence from all bureaux of relevant client experiences related to such campaigns. The details are then used to coordinate an informed national response.
Here we provide an insight into some of the campaigns on social issues that Citizens Advice, locally or nationally, have been involved in of late:
Employment Support Allowance
Many welfare and advice organisations have expressed concern about the impact that the changes introduced with this new benefit will have on many vulnerable claimants.
Local Housing Allowance
This is a new approach to the way in which help with rent is administered by local authorities for the private tenant. Information requested will help ensure that the introduction is consistent and fair while identifying possible local and national issues where improvements should be made.
Private Rented Sector Review
The increasing reliance by central government and local authorities on the private rented sector to meet the national and local housing needs, has identified many shortfalls in current housing legislation for both tenants and landlord. A review is currently ongoing and the information gathered will help focus on the changes necessary to support everyone involved. Local experience is mainly with tenants, many of the issues relate to their rights and the effective enforcement of those rights.
NHS Dentists
Every Primary Care Trust in England should now have a dental helpline, the purpose of which is to make it easier for people to find an NHS dentist in their local area.
The Department of Health has asked us whether we could undertake some “mystery shopping” to find out how effective these helplines are. As many bureaux report enquiries from clients unable to find a dentist, the quality of the service provided by dental helplines is clearly a social policy concern for the CAB service.
Bureaux across England have been making telephone calls to their local dental helplines and completing a brief questionnaire. From the results a report will be produced for the Department of Health and for use by the CAB service.
Child Poverty
Volunteers, bureaux staff and Citizens Advice staff came out to march in central London to end child poverty. Together with 10,000 people from organisations such as Barnardos and Oxfam, Citizens Advice calls on the government to keep its promise to halve child poverty by 2010 and end it by 2020. One in three children in Britain live in poverty today and as a member of the End child poverty coalition, Citizens Advice aims to keep the government to its promise.
As part of Citizens Advice End child poverty campaign we asked parents who find it difficult to make their money last how this affects their children. The resulting report: This is child poverty gives a new insight into the financial, emotional and physical impact of poverty on children in modern Britain. The report gives a voice to some of the families behind the statistics.
We welcome comments on Social Policy issues by email at:
Social dot Policy at ipswichcab dot org dot uk
