Five Glasgow advice offices to close
Glasgow's switch from grants to contracts leaves five bureaux in the city's poorest areas facing closure at the end of March.
Five of Glasgow’s eight Citizens Advice Bureaux are due to close on 31 March. Citizens Advice Scotland announced this week that the bureaux in Easterhouse, Bridgeton, Parkhead, Pollok and Castlemilk will shut with the loss of 42 jobs unless new funding is agreed. If they go, the service in Scotland’s largest city will be down to Glasgow Central, Drumchapel and Maryhill.
How it came to this
The cause is a change in how Glasgow City Council pays for advice. Instead of grants to individual agencies, the council put its advice budget out to tender as three-year contracts. The contracts went to a consortium of other advice providers called the Glasgow Advice Agency, and the five bureaux have been trying since 2011 to agree terms as its subcontractors. With three weeks left on their existing funding and still no formal offer, their boards decided to announce closure.
The council says nothing needs to close, because the bureaux have been offered a year’s funding through the consortium. Citizens Advice Scotland answers that the offer asks them to take on more work on a standstill budget, after a year spent running down reserves, and that this is a cut in real terms. Patrick Harvie, the Green MSP for Glasgow, has called the tendering an “absolute shambles” and says voluntary groups should never have been made to compete to provide a free public service.
What is at stake
The five offices sit in some of the most deprived parts of the city. By Citizens Advice Scotland’s count, Glasgow’s bureaux helped nearly 27,000 people last year with around 80,000 separate problems, and every pound of funding brought £21 of gains for clients in benefits claimed, debts written off and evictions avoided. Those are the organisation’s own figures, but nobody seriously disputes that demand has climbed since the recession.
It is about to climb further. The Welfare Reform Act 2012, which received Royal Assent on 8 March, starts the move to Universal Credit, replaces Disability Living Allowance for working-age claimants with Personal Independence Payment and caps the total benefit a household can receive. Each change will produce letters, reassessments and appeals, and people in Easterhouse or Castlemilk will need someone who can explain them.
What a bureau does
A bureau gives advice that is free, confidential and independent of government and business to anyone who walks through the door. Advisers, many of them trained volunteers, handle benefits, debt, housing, work and consumer problems. They help with forms and write to creditors and landlords on a client’s behalf, and many bureaux represent people at tribunals. Citizens Advice Bureaux have been part of Glasgow life since 1939.
Where to go in the meantime
Anyone with a problem now should not wait for the dispute to be settled. The three remaining bureaux stay open, and the members of the Glasgow Advice Agency are funded to give advice across the city. For money worries, the Money Advice Service gives free guidance online and by phone. Shelter Scotland runs a housing advice helpline for people facing eviction or homelessness. Anyone who wants to challenge a benefit decision should act at once, because the deadlines for asking for a reconsideration or lodging an appeal are short.
Since then: on 16 March, the day this note appeared, Citizens Advice Scotland announced that the boards of all five bureaux had agreed in principle to a three-year subcontract with the Glasgow Advice Agency, with the council adding £250,000 a year to hold their funding at its existing level, and all five stayed open.