Use It Or Lose It: The Battle to Protect Free Advice Services
With face-to-face advice services under threat from continued austerity, INGRID ALLAN looks back at the unique role they’ve played in improving welfare across Hastings and East Sussex and offers advice
Nearly everything we have come to enjoy and rely on in our everyday lives usually follows a familiar pattern: exclusively available to the aristocracy, then to the slightly better off, then, after a long uphill struggle, to the poor. This is true of tea, parks, chocolate, lawyers, central heating, medicine, mortgages, French bulldogs, access to the arts, and almost everything else you could think of, with one notable exception.
Advice services, one of the few pillars of our battered welfare state to have survived both Thatcherism and austerity in remarkably rude health, were set up entirely with ordinary people in mind. From the very beginning, debt played a huge role in any advice service’s remit. Household incomes fell throughout the early 1940s, as men were called up to fight, or sent home in coffins, depriving many families of their main breadwinner. By 1942, there was a record 1,074 Citizens Advice Bureaux, from large, grand premises based directly in town halls, to a converted horsebox which toured the areas worst affected by bombing to offer support to the survivors. Most had at least one debt specialist, a practice that continues to this day.
Brighton Housing Trust (BHT) sprang up from a single hostel on Islingword Road in 1968. It now offers expert housing advice to those facing homelessness across Sussex, including victims of the dreaded Section 21 no-fault eviction.
The Federation of Independent Advice Centres (which would go on to form Advice UK) was formed in 1979 when 100 or so activists from several major cities met at a North Kensington primary school. Unlike the Citizens’ Advice Bureau (CAB) model, where offices are reliant on well-established and standardised practices, any local charity could theoretically become a member. The original intention was primarily to pool resources where it made sense to do so. Following a spike in membership during the Miners’ Strike, the FIAC turned its attention to developing educational tools and, from 1989, offered some of the first nationally recognised advice courses.
Hastings Advice and Representation Centre (HARC) was founded over 40 years ago to provide free and confidential benefits advice, to address inequality, relieve poverty and improve the quality of life for vulnerable and disadvantaged individuals and families. Today, they are staying true to these stated aims.
While the advice sector across Hastings, St. Leonards, and the surrounding villages can feel like a crowded field, with HARC, Citizens Advice 1066, the Seaview Project, and BHT Floating Support among others all providing crossover services, there are plenty of people needing help. Advice services will regularly make referrals across different areas of expertise, or where appointment slots are fully booked months in the future. Around 19,000 client contacts were made in the year to March 2024 to HARC alone, representing a significant chunk of our town’s 92,000 population, and these numbers only look set to grow if next winter is as unforgiving as the last.
I spoke to Wendy Knowles, Development Manager at HARC, about the importance of advice provision generally, and the unique challenges facing our town. Though we work for different advice services, her verdict on the sector mirrored my own:
“A recurring theme over the past 42 years that HARC has been around is that the poor are always the hardest hit when there is a period of financial instability. Whether or not you would agree with the old adage that the rich get richer, it is difficult to deny the poor are getting poorer.
“Our clients tell us that the current welfare system is not accessible. Application processes and assessments are increasingly complex and restrictive, making the system incredibly difficult to navigate. In addition, parliamentary decisions and media communications have traditionally fuelled a narrative where benefit claimants are seen as ‘idle’ and fostered a culture of shame.”
Wendy has no doubt seen, as I have, an increasing number of those who have never had to claim means-tested or disability benefits before, being completely overwhelmed by the bureaucracy involved, alongside a steady stream of returning clients with complex problems and chaotic lives who have been having to navigate the system for so long that they have given up hope things will ever get easier.
A rash of punitive and reactionary immigration reforms introduced since Brexit have also meant advice services are dealing with more and more immigration-related issues, whether from those who have been here for decades, or from recent arrivals. So, what happens when the advisers themselves start to feel a bit overwhelmed?
Luckily, the advice sector has the backing of a solid infrastructure of other charities and organisations that they can turn to when a particularly challenging case comes their way. The No Recourse to Public Funds Network (NRPF) advises organisations dealing with anyone from asylum seekers to spouses of British citizens who cannot claim benefits, on their rights in the UK.
Shelter has a specialist team providing expert debt advice (including case law) to debt advisers who have exhausted every other avenue, and the Institute of Money Advisers give them excellent training and support throughout their careers.
Mind Infoline and Rethink can pick up cases where a client may be struggling with their mental health, including through conference calls to introduce a distressed client to a dedicated mental health professional.
This is to say nothing of the degree to which we all pitch in to help each other.
So, what can we all do to better support our local advice services? When you use them, treat their staff and volunteers well by keeping appointments or calling ahead to cancel. Don’t misdirect anger over systemic injustices, and bring along relevant paperwork. Raise awareness of the good they do. Citizens Advice have long maintained a policy of never publishing posters or literature asking for donations, so few are even aware of their charity status, but it’s important to remember that many of these services used to receive the bulk of their funding from local authorities and are now having to raise it elsewhere. To the majority of service users who have nothing to give, sometimes a kind word and a sense of a job well done is all it takes to lift an adviser’s spirits. We’re also partial to biscuits.
INGRID ALLAN is a charity caseworker and local campaigner who moved to Hastings in 2023. She can often be found on West Hill with her dog Bentham. For Hastings Advice and Representation Centre visit harcuk.com
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