CAB faces survival crisis

AN organisation currently advising 8,000 people a year and helping to resolve personal debts totalling nearly £1.2m could find itself homeless.

This was the stark message Bexhill and Rother Citizens' Advice Bureau manager Jill Loader had for town MP Gregory Barker when he made the first visit paid by a local MP to the Sackville Road headquarters on Tuesday.

The visit was agreed before Bexhill Council of Voluntary Services, which owns the building the CAB shares with Bexhill Caring Community, announced that it wants to sell before winding-up its affairs.

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No deadline to quit has yet been given. But Mrs Loader, her staff of two and the 32 volunteers who make the work of the CAB possible, face a double problem:

q Finding suitable alternative premises;

q Obtaining the funding to meet greatly-increased rent if they find them.

The MP was amazed to find six volunteers crowded into a single ground floor office packed with computer terminals and filing cabinets.

Tiny interview cubicles are so close together that a radio is kept playing constantly in order to preserve essential client confidentiality.

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Upstairs, Karen Denison, who specialises in debt counselling, explained the worrying extent of personal debt in Bexhill and rural Rother.

Clients currently being helped have total personal debts of 1,191,000 - and that excludes mortgages.

Personal debt in excess of 30,000 is not uncommon. Some clients have struggled to juggle payments on as many as ten different credit cards.

The CAB has managed to obtain benefits funding totalling more than 690,000 for clients in the past year alone.

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Yet the urgent need for debt counselling is not confined to lower income groups but frequently affects higher earners who have over-reached themselves, been made redundant or otherwise fallen on hard times.

The CAB manager told the MP: "The situation is that Bexhill Council of Voluntary Services, itself a charity, owns this building. They have decided this year that it is no longer sustainable."

The CAB pays its 3,500-a-year rent, and other overheads including travel costs for home visits and its outreach programme, to rural Rother out of a 53,000 a year grant from Rother.

This is paid under a three-year service-level agreement with the authority, which is not required by law to assist the CAB.

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Mrs Loader told the MP: "Obviously, the rents we have been paying have not been enough to cover the maintenance of the building. BCVS have discovered quite a number of problems with the roof area.

"All we have been told is that they have made a decision to sell. We don't have a date when we have to go but they are getting a valuation on the property and the decision has been taken to disband the BCVS and sell the building.

"This leaves us totally adrift...

"The CAB is funded through the local authority. I have to go cap-in-hand to them over our three-year service-level agreement."

The CAB needs town centre accommodation with ground floor access for the elderly and disabled. Properties in Western Road or Devonshire Road would cost a prohibitive 12,000 a year.

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One ground floor office is available elsewhere at 7,000. But a possible deal is dependent on obtaining a partner's decision on allowing internal partitions to create confidential interview rooms.

Even if a lease proves possible, a move would be dependent on Rother providing another 3,500 a year in funding.

Even then, Mrs Loader would have to throw the CAB on the mercy of local sponsorship and practical help from local service groups to undertake the conversion and the move.

For the past five years the Friends of the CAB have been holding fund-raising events to buy the computers and other equipment without which the bureau could not work.

She says: "I am really in a cleft stick at the moment!"

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The potential homelessness problem could not come at a worse time. The manager's annual report, due to go before the AGM last evening, shows that not only are 8,000 people a year seeking the help of the CAB's volunteers but that many clients face a complex series of inter-related problem.

Debt counselling now forms the largest part of the CAB's work with the AVERAGE debt more than 15,000 per client

Karen Denison and two colleagues work to produce a financial statement for each client, setting out priority debts and non-priority debts and suggesting a payment plan. These are presented to creditors.

Mrs Loader says: "Ninety per cent respond saying 'yes,' subject to a review at six months."

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Karen Denison says: "A lot of people don't realise that they have to pay their rent and their Council Tax before they go out for the night..."

The MP said: "I will certainly urge my colleagues on Rother to look as constructively as they can at your application.

"It is absolutely vital work, not only to maintain the fabric of the community but to the work that the Taskforce is trying to do.

"I am amazed how many case you are coping with and how many complex cases they are able to deal with out of such small premises - and almost all by volunteers.

"As a community, we are incredibly lucky that so many people are prepared to devote so much of their time to helping others."

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