Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser
Jobs lost at bureaux as budgets slashed
Monklands’ two Citizens Advice Bureaux (CABx) say they have already had to issue redundancy notices to staff after North Lanarkshire Council approved a funding cut.
The Coatbridge service will lose £67,100 per year while the Airdrie office’s reduction will be £60,350 – effective from next week, following a budgetary decision made by the policy and resources committee.
Staff from the offices say they are already having to turn people away as the cuts impact on specialist services.
However, council leader Jim Logue insists the reductions amount to a much smaller proportion of the respective organisations’ overall budgets; and says the funding review was necessary due to the council’s budget constraints and is “long overdue”.
Coatbridge bureau manager Marian Tobin told the Advertiser: “We’ve already had to turn people with debt issues away – we can’t take on any new clients as we won’t have the funding to run that service.
“We’ve issued two redundancy notices and are running down that service to pass to the council, but a lot of people don’t want to approach them as a statutory authority for debt advice.
“We can run the welfare rights service until March but then it has to be reduced; external funding applications take up to six months so it’s a long process to try replacing this money.”
While the council will still make the existing level of core funding available, the reduction in office-specific totals amounts to 57 per cent of Coatbridge’s existing North Lanarkshire funding and 48 per cent of Airdrie’s.
Councillors agreed to “commission” paid services from outside advice providers when required, and to remove “duplication of provision within the CABx of services provided by the council” by removing the current grants paid for money, welfare and “additional non-core” support.
Marian added: “I think it’s very disappointing; we’re inundated with people who trust the CAB brand and know we’re independent, but now we’re having to say we can’t now give specialist debt advice.
“General services and day- to- day running are done by volunteers but the staff members who provide specialist services, and who run evening outreach surgeries and make home visits to people, are affected by this funding.
“Both the Coatbridge and Airdrie bureaux are disappointed by the decision; these cuts were approved despite more than 4500 petition signatures and 1000 individual letters protesting about their severity.”
The funding decision follows February’s £ 31 million cut to North Lanarkshire’s budget for the year, which was followed by a full review of the council’s advice services and passed by nine votes to six at last week’s meeting.
It will see the local authority’s in-house money and welfare advice services merged into one financial inclusion team, restructuring with a net loss of three posts and an overall annual saving of £123,000.
Each CAB will now receive their core grant, of £64,358 for Airdrie and £50,071 for Coatbridge; the council will also still provide a further grant of £ 62,706 for housing advice, which is recorded as being part of Coatbridge CAB’s funding but which managers say is actually shared to provide a North Lanarkshire-wide service.
Councillor Logue told the Advertiser: “We had a budget cut of £31 million, so I don’t think anyone should be surprised that it has this consequential impact – every public pound has to be scrutinised, and the CABx hasn’t been revisited since 1996.
“This has to be put in the context of each bureau’s annual operational budget; there’s a plethora of other external funders. We’re faced with extremely difficult decisions, but simplifying services and removing duplication will ensure better access to advice for people.”
He reiterated that the council had to make huge budget cuts this year which resulted in 129 redundancies among its staff, and said: “CABx provide important services, but it’s indefensible to make the kind of significant cuts to council services we’ve been forced to make and not also review the funding provided to others.
“It’s important to make sure there’s a standard service; there are major discrepancies between what the different bureaux do, such as tribunal representations, and in their numbers of paid staff, and as a grant funder we can say that if we’re giving public money, this is what we’re entitled to.
“There’s got to be a degree of objectivity and I’d ask the bureaux to look at the financial reality – we have to look at bottomline budgeting now because of the level of local government efficiency savings; it’s then up to each CAB to do their own management.
“We value the support given by the third and voluntary sector. In our meetings, it was recognised that the status quo wasn’t sustainable, and I think we can sit down together, do this in a measured way and result in improvements to the service.”
We’ve issued two redundancy notices and are running down that service to pass to the council