Let's Make Good Advice a Priority
Posted by Karen Buck, MP for Regent's Park and Kensington North, at 13:32, Thu 12 October 2006:
To the Annual General Meeting of the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, to mark another year in which a small and dedicated team of staff and volunteers stand between thousands of anxious and sometimes desperate people, and debt, repossession, arrears, eviction and more. What an impressive bunch they are. Like their counterparts in the local law centre and other key advice organisations, such as CHAS and the Central London Advice Service in Church Street, they offer services which range from simple signposting to high level support with appeals in what must be one of the most challenging environments in the whole country.
We may, in many respects, be getting smarter as a society (and, whatever the doom-mongers like to say, I believe we are), but the simple fact remains that simultaneously, society is getting more complex, and many people struggle to keep up. Whether this is older people who back away from the impersonality of telephone advice lines, people with mental health or alcohol and drug problems; people with no fixed address; the substantial minority who struggle with functional literacy, those who first language is not English or those without access to a computer, in my experience, something approaching one person in three has some difficulty with the official, or even the commercial world. (Of course, the world of benefit application forms and hire-purchase agreements is not exactly user-friendly to begin with. I remember visiting the head offices of the Benefits Agency a few years ago, to be told proudly that forms were now available in a number of commonly-used languages. ‘A pity’, I told them, ‘that none of these include English’’. There is something about the computer-generated letter that defies understanding, even if you have a doctorate in analytical linguistics).
If we want to encourage self-reliance and self-respect, as we do, we need to go a great deal further in simplifying forms and agreements, into plain English and plain arithmetic. We need to teach our children what credit cards really cost and how to calculate whether an endowment mortgage is really the win-win deal that the ‘on-commission’ salesmen tells them it is. But ultimately, we will always need (and need a great deal more of) accessible, high-quality, free advice services. The parsimonious attitude of Westminster Council, and the rather too straight-jacketed approach being taken by the government in the current review of advice and justice services, strikes me as short-sighted in the extreme. Good advice services pay for themselves: a fact recognised in the recent independent report of the Westminster Housing Commission in respect of housing, but a point which is applicable in any context. The Commission report said “We have seen how homelessness can be prevented through good advice…In the past a comprehensive advice service was regarded as the height of good practice…today, this is less fashionable as a local government priority. The one-stop shop has given way to a more fragmented and less accessible service”.
This is all good sense. Now it is time for the Council to put its money where its mouth is. Organisations like the CAB and Law Centres exist on a shoe string, and work wonders. How much more could they achieve if comprehensive, good quality advice services become a real local priority?
For more information please visit www.karenbuck.org.uk
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