Serious benefits - Citizens Advice

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Getting the house in order • Esher CAB ran a Benefit Take Up Campaign for Pensioners when the Minimum Income Guarantee levels were increased in 2001. They soon realised that these changes would result in more pensioners being eligible for partial Council Tax Benefit. Esher CAB raised the issue with Elmbridge Borough Council who agreed to use their database of current Housing Benefit claims to identify pensioners receiving some Housing Benefit but no Council Tax Benefit. The Council then wrote to those identified to ask whether they wished to make a claim for partial Council Tax Benefit in addition to Housing Benefit. For owner occupiers the Council undertook to identify previous applicants who had made unsuccessful claims to check whether because of the changes, they now qualified. • In the last eighteen months, Dartford CAB has arranged three training sessions with housing officers from the local authority housing department on topics like benefits awareness, budgeting and debt. As a result, housing officers are more able to identify where tenants may be under-claiming benefits and will readily refer tenants to the CAB for debt advice. Everybody wins by investing in income maximisation. Rents are paid, homes are kept and expensive possession action is avoided. Arecent Citizens Advice social policy report, Possession action - the last resort highlights how increasingly, social landlords appreciate the part that independent CAB money and benefits advice can play in keeping tenants who are behind with their rent out of the courts and in their homes. More and more social landlords advise tenants to seek CAB help as soon as a rent payment is late. Some housing officers have developed systems that refer tenants who are having financial difficulties direct to the CAB, before resorting to court action. Advice focusing on income maximisation, including checking that all the benefits and tax credits to which a tenant may be eligible are being claimed and providing help to make claims, can mean the difference between maintaining a tenancy and eviction. Such are the benefits that some social landlords fund CAB to support their tenants. One of those is Eastern Valley Housing Association, which funds Torfaen CAB to employ a part time money adviser post specifically to help their tenants. Citizens Advice suggests a ‘statement of practice’ to help prevent evictions which recommends that social landlords should ‘provide their tenants with access to welfare rights advice across the full range of benefits’. Developing good working relationships with other agencies is central to success. Stroud CAB reports that its local authority regularly accepts CAB offers on behalf of tenants with rent arrears and will ring the CAB if a client has defaulted on an arrangement that the CAB has negotiated, to see if they know why there is a problem. So important is joint working, that in 2002, Citizens Advice and the Camden Housing Benefit Service produced Everyone Benefits, a model for establishing and developing liaison between local authority housing benefits services and Citizens Advice Bureaux. Its aim was to promote good practice and facilitate continuous improvement in service delivery and accountability on housing benefit. The section on promotion and take-up highlights the need ‘to reach those in the local community who find the claims process difficult and confusing’. Everyone Benefits is endorsed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) which suggests that the guide complements its own national performance standards for secure and effective housing benefit and council tax benefit administration. 14 Serious benefits
Sharing experience Citizens Advice social policy evidence reports Citizens Advice Bureaux have learnt much about how to execute successful benefit take-up campaigns. Sharing expertise helps others to run them successfully and efficiently. Partnerships Building good working relationships with other local agencies concerned with benefit take-up and pooling resources to run joint campaigns is central to many successful campaigns. Face-to-face contact Where resources allow, personalised contact is extremely effective in building trust and the confidence to claim. Many people need this high level of support to negotiate the system. Targeting Specific targeting of particular groups is more valuable than ‘blanket’ campaigns. Outreach sessions at appropriate venues are also very important. Using resources Using resources that are available can save ‘reinventing the wheel’. Other interested agencies may have resources which can be used to help your campaign. Try the local authority, the Department for Work and Pensions and charities such as Age Concern. Job satisfaction Benefit take-up work gives high levels of satisfaction to CAB workers and volunteers alike, because the benefit to clients is so immediately apparent. Monitoring and recording results Taking time to work out a system to record and evaluate the results of a campaign pays dividends. Making sure that everyone involved has been trained to use the same system is vital. It is important to be able to accurately demonstrate the effectiveness of the work to funders and the local community. Staff time Don’t under-estimate the resources needed for a campaign, including staff and management and time for recording and evaluation. Bear in mind that some clients will need ongoing advocacy, especially if they require support to make appeals. Reports published by Citizens Advice can be downloaded or ordered at www.citizensadvice.org.uk or on 020 7833 7054. • Possession action – the last resort, 2003. • CAB campaigns for benefit take-up among older people, 2002. • Everyone Benefits: A guide to promoting partnerships between Local Authority Housing Benefit Services and Citizens Advice Bureaux, 2002. • Unfair and underfunded: CAB evidence on what’s wrong with the Social Fund, 2002. • Benefit administration campaign report: national summary, 2002. • Work in progress: CAB clients’ experience of Working Families Tax Credit, 2001. • Falling short: the CAB case for housing benefit reform, 1999. • Benefits and work: a CAB perspective on the welfare to work debate, 1997. References • Introduction/p4: Tackling Pensioner Poverty - Encouraging Take-up of Entitlements, National Audit Office, November 2002. • Page 9: Citizens advice in primary care for families with young children, August 2001, School of Health Policy and Practice, University of East Anglia. • Page 12: OPM quinquennial review of Citizens Advice Bureaux 2001/2002 for the Department of Trade and Industry (www.dti.gov.uk). Serious benefits 15
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Serious benefits - Citizens Advice

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