Advice NI's response to Minister Alex Attwood's letter on budgets

How we might protect the vulnerable, preserve the best of voluntary and community action and create the space to grow and test new ideas

Background

Advice NI is a membership organisation that exists to provide leadership, representation and support for independent advice organisations to facilitate the delivery of high quality, sustainable advice services. Advice NI exists to provide its members with the capacity and tools to ensure effective advice services delivery. This includes: advice and information management systems, funding and planning, quality assurance support, NVQs in advice and guidance, social policy co-ordination and ICT development. 

Membership of Advice NI is normally for organisations that provide significant advice and information services to the public. Advice NI has over 70 member organisations operating throughout Northern Ireland and providing information and advocacy services to over 100,000 people each year dealing with over 220,000 enquiries on an extensive range of matters including: social security, housing, debt, consumer and employment issues. For further information, please visit www.adviceni.net.

Introduction

We welcome the commitment of the Minister to the community and voluntary sector and his acknowledgement of the role of the sector in meeting need across Northern Ireland. Advice NI also welcomes the opportunity to respond to the invitation for ideas as to how we might protect the vulnerable, preserve the best of voluntary and community action and create the space to grow and test new ideas – in an environment of public expenditure cuts.

In terms of advice services, the current economic climate has pushed demand for advice services to the limit. Many lower income families in Northern Ireland are struggling to pay bills and make ends meet. Over the last year there has been a substantial increase in electricity, heating oil, gas prices and average grocery bills. This coupled with the fact that the uprating of benefits and the national minimum wage is minimal in comparison means that people find themselves in under greater pressure in terms of making ends meet. The prospect of increasing employment insecurity across the public, private and CVS will only increase the pressures facing Advice NI members.

Given the impact of the emergency budget, the imminent Comprehensive Spending Review, deliberations in terms of public sector spending cuts, the fact that Northern Ireland will lag behind the rest of the UK in terms of any economic recovery, the likely increase in Bank of England base rate in the coming months and the impact of welfare reform proposals (including the migration of Incapacity Benefit claimants on to the more stringent ESA test and the proposals to introduce more stringent DLA criteria): all of these factors will cause demand for advice services to undoubtedly increase over the short to medium term. 

In fact the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said that the coalition government's first Budget has hit the poorest families hardest and that the measures announced in the Budget in June were "regressive". Its analysis suggests that low income families with children are set to lose the most as a percentage of net income due to benefit cuts announced in the Budget.

Advice NI’s latest Membership Profile Report has highlighted a 13% increase over the last year in enquiries dealt with (from 200,456 to 227, 802) with evidence that services are responding to the demands of the recession in respect of increased employment (+5%), housing (+1%) and debt (+1%) queries.

Advice NI’s Debt Action NI money and debt advice service delivers debt advice in 13 specific council areas across NI namely Armagh, Ballymena, Belfast, Cookstown, Craigavon, Downpatrick, Limavady, Lisburn, Magherafelt, Moyle, Omagh, Newry and Mourne, and Strabane. To date our advisers have helped over 1,162 clients dealing with over £16.5 million pounds worth of debt.

This data ties in with the statistics provided form official sources which includes:

In total 773 actions for mortgage possession were recorded for the quarter ending March 2010;

In total, 5,225 households presented as homeless to NIHE from January – March 2010;

The seasonally adjusted claimant count in July 2010 increased by 800 over the month to 56,800; 

Over the year the NI Claimant Count level increased by 11.8%, compared to a fall of 7.6% in the UK. The annual change in NI was the highest increase among the twelve UK regions;

Advice services and Advice NI member services in particular are providing a lifeline to people at a time of crisis in their lives.

Advice NI ‘generalist’ members are providing help on a wide range of issues – targeting particular geographical areas of need; for example responding to

Advice NI ‘specialist’ members are providing support to people – where comprehensive, in-depth expert knowledge of a specific subject or topic is required. For example in terms of housing this can include representation at court in repossession hearings;

(3)Advice NI ‘targeted’ services are ‘bespoke’ and ‘authoritative’ due to familiarity with and expertise in understanding and addressing the problems, queries or barriers experienced by particular client groups. For example Age NI provides tailored support and assistance for older people; members such as Mencap and STEER Mental Health provide services specifically for people with mental health difficulties, their family, friends and carers.

• Question 1

What should be the priority areas within DSD to best protect those in need, stress or disadvantage? What works best and what should be reviewed?

Advice NI believes that advice services must be a priority area to be protected within the context of potential spending cuts. Examples of which highlight the value of advice interventions on vulnerable people include:

Advice NI believes that the range of services (generalist, specialist, targeted) of Advice NI members are directly contributing towards the health and well-being of people in Northern Ireland, generate income for households which boosts the economy of Northern Ireland and directly contribute towards Governmental policy initiatives including:

·      Section 75 of the NI Act (1998);

·      Promoting Social Inclusion;

·      Promoting Health & Well Being;

·      Programme for Government including:

(PSA 7 MAKING PEOPLES’ LIVES BETTER

Aim: Drive a programme across Government to reduce poverty and address inequality and disadvantage.

PSA 8 PROMOTING HEALTH AND ADDRESSING HEALTH INEQUALITIES

Aim: Promote healthy lifestyles, address the causes of poor health and wellbeing and achieve measurable reductions in health inequalities and preventable illnesses.

PSA 12 HOUSING, URBAN REGENERATION AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Aim: Promote decent, energy efficient, affordable housing and regenerate disadvantaged areas and towns and city centres, and support community development to create environments which enhance quality of life and contribute to well-being.

PSA 20 IMPROVING PUBLIC SERVICES

Aim: Improve the quality and the cost-effectiveness of public services to include delivery of the wider public sector reform programme and efficiency savings and outworking of decisions on the RPA

As an infra-structural support organisation, Advice NI aims to ensure that:

·      members provide consistent high quality,  independent and impartial advice services

·      people have access to reliable and accountable advice services

·      members have a platform for the articulation of policy issues to policy/decision makers

·      people experiencing social need have access to effective services via a range of delivery channels

• Question 2

What could or should be done within the voluntary and community sector to work better to address overheads and deliver greater benefits to the community?

In consultation responses regarding ‘Opening Doors’ and ‘Area Advice Centres’, Advice NI has consistently called for a strategic approach to the development of advice services across Northern Ireland and welcomed ‘Opening Doors’ as setting the scene for greater joined up working between all advice providers. Our approach has consistently been to see the needs of service users as paramount; to take an all-encompassing inclusive approach; and build on what is best about current provision.  

Advice NI has taken forward on a pilot basis a piece of work which attempts to examine the customer experience of advice services and public sector services (SSA and NIHE).

The project has built on work carried out by Advice UK, which found that enormous amounts of public money were being spent dealing with the spiralling downstream effects of an epidemic of late, lost or wrong payments or entitlement calculations by the tax and benefits authorities. The huge knock-on costs when claimants take what are originally tax and benefit problems to already overstretched advice agencies and then if they are still not resolved are dragged through legal tribunals and the court system, are potentially wasting millions of pounds of taxpayers’

The Advice NI Systems Thinking project focused on the service user, critically examining service delivery ‘front to back’ from the service users perspective. The approach has focused on the high volume demands placed upon advice agencies namely social security benefit enquiries and housing enquiries both of which fall within the remit of the Department for Social Development.

To date the project has managed to record, verbatim, demand hitting advice services; categorised this into value and failure demand; identified a number of random closed cases and tracked these through both the NIHE and SSA systems in order to establish end-to-end times. Outstanding work to be completed includes mapping flow (studying how everything works end-to-end from the claimant’s perspective); identifying system conditions (including performance management frameworks, arbitrary measures & targets, IT, contracts and so on); and finally examining management thinking in terms of how the thinking constrains the capability of the system from the customer’s point of view.

Advice NI would urge that consideration be given to the potential of systems thinking: in terms of transforming advice services, wider CVS service provision and public sector service delivery. Part of this transformation could take forward the potential role of shared services for example in terms of the reports produced by the Advice Services Alliance sub-groups on training, quality assurance and ICT. A report on the Systems Thinking pilot will be published shortly and we would welcome further engagement on this approach.

• Question 3 

Do you have any wider comments about how the Executive should address the budgetary situation?

Advice NI agrees with Minister Attwood that frontline services and vulnerable people need to be protected. Already advice centres are seeing people who have been left to ‘flounder’ because they have been deemed not sick or disabled enough to qualify for Employment & Support Allowance, but not fit to work for Job Seekers Allowance purposes. We further hear about plans to exclude from benefit people with addiction problems who do not agree to tackle their problems.

In our view, the ‘hardest to help’ very often represent the most vulnerable within our society – in terms of ill health (physical and mental), educational status, housing status, employment readiness, language barriers, income and so on. Advice NI believes that as long as the reform agenda appears to be only interested in removing people as a benefit statistic – not meaningfully supporting people to make the transition into employment – the ‘hardest to help’ may be left to ‘flounder’ as described above.

The system must play its part in ensuring that people have sufficient income to put food on the table, keep a roof over their head and provide a basis to make informed decisions about moving from benefits to work.

In previous welfare reform consultations, Advice NI has highlighted that “forced integration into the labour market will not work” without the associated significant increases in spending on areas such as childcare. Government should not shirk its responsibilities in this regard and Advice NI believes that sufficient resources will have to be made available if welfare reform is to have any meaningful positive impact. A firm focus should be on helping those who move from welfare to work to retain their jobs over the longer term and supporting the hardest to help benefit recipients who may be left behind by welfare reform, as the labour market is swelled by students and those recently made redundant who may be felt to be more ‘job ready’.

Advice services can play a vital role in helping to ensure that no-one is left to ‘flounder’ in an environment of stringent cuts. Advice services can assist people move from welfare to work. Advice services can help fulfill the Programme for Government aims. Strong decisions are required to protect advice services now so that they can continue to provide support to those that need it most.

Contact information on this Social Policy Briefing Paper:

Bob Stronge (Chief Executive)
Fiona Magee (Deputy Chief Executive)
Kevin Higgins (Head of Policy)

Advice NI, 1 Rushfield Avenue, Belfast BT7 3FP
Tel: 028 9064 5919; Fax: 028 9049 2313
Email: bob@adviceni.net
fiona@adviceni.net
kevin@adviceni.net

Website: www.adviceni.net

Other Responses

A list of the other organisations willing to share their responses. If you would like yours to be included, please forward to lisa.mcelherron@nicva.org

Smart Solutions in Tough Times

To keep up to date with what's happening in the sector on the issue of the Comprehensive Spending Review, including a number of events, check our Smart Solutions section or read the campaign blog.