A week in the life of Citizens Advice North East Derbyshire

At Citizens Advice North East Derbyshire our clients are at the centre of everything we do. They are the reason we exist. We recently spent a week highlighting our work on Twitter using the #CABlive hashtag. We have compiled a report from those tweets which can be viewed here. The report shows the huge breadth of work carried out by our paid and volunteer advisers but it is by no means unusual; every week we help the people of North East Derbyshire and Bolsover Districts with whatever issues they come to us with.

It is worth noting that the work we are able to do is heavily reliant on our volunteers, who give up their time to give back to their community. Between them our volunteers have over 70 years’ worth of experience. Without them we would not be able to do the work we do.

Through the tireless work of our advisers we have so far this year helped our clients to obtain more than £1.5 million and have dealt with almost £5 million worth of debt. We make a massive difference to the lives of our clients.

As well as assisting our clients to resolve the issues which they come to us with, we also campaign for long term change. We are ideally placed to monitor issues which are causing detriment to our clients and the wider population of North East Derbyshire and Bolsover. The roll out of Universal Credit (UC) began to take effect this year and, in addition to helping clients with their claims, we have been closely monitoring the problems with the benefit. We have raised our concerns with our local MPs and with National Citizens Advice who, last year, successfully campaigned to reduce the initial waiting period for payment of UC and who continue to lobby for improvements to the benefit.

In all of our work, our priority is to improve the lives of our clients and the residents of North East Derbyshire and Bolsover.