Help- I am sick with worry

crutches

yes fran sorry to be unclear. they said shelter first as apriority.i spoke to carers outreach today who have got a solicitor who is contacting social services about their obligations.The jocentrewant me back in aweek for another interview because they had staffmixup.off to battle again

crutches

i saw carers outreach yesterday and today social servicessaid they had had a fax from carers outreach stating that my husbands health wassuffering and that the children were suffering too,and that if we had had hepl we would not be insuch a mess.
the"panel" have aw arded us 2 hrs childcare after school for a 4 +6 yr old 1 day a eek which is brilliant.they will consider nursery fees for the baby so i'm waiting for the nursery to phone back wih times/vacancies/prices etc.i'm so pleased to havesome good newsat last.paid £100 to bank yesterdAY so we have £30 till thurs and the car has just blown up!(this was an expensive one....cost us £300:( last sept)

Fran

Glad to hear some good news about child care after all the effort you're putting in to sorting it out.

jellyhead

great news about the childcare, i hope you get some sorted for the baby too, and that the car isn't too expensive!!

i don't know anything about it, but could you get a mobility car is it called? i think it's a cheaper car for people with physical difficulties, if they get IB or DLA but like i said i don't know the details.

crutches

IF i get awarded dla at the relevant rate i'll check it out.
car is definitely dead.ppity. here esp.for a large family public transport is expensive,and infrquent .kids school is not on our route so 2 buses or walkup hill anddownhill.(very steep).at least its summer.!

margaretclare

Fran wrote:

When was this, because since 1999 volunteers have to do a more in depth training course which takes about 6 months before they get to advise people - they can choose to get a certificate at the end so it is now a recognized qualification. I would have thought that now you would get returned calls if that is what has been promised because the level of advice is higher. Also it's the individual adviser who has been at fault if you don't get the returned call, the bureau might be ok but perhaps you just got someone who wasn't on the ball and you should complain to the manager if this happens.

I think in crutches' case the CAB would be very useful because they can deal with all of the issues and see the situation as a whole - it's more difficult to get the right advice if you are going to two or three different advisors with different ways of working.

Fran, I started training with CAB as a volunteer adviser in early 2003. I did the 5-day course a year ago. Because of various spells of time out for health reasons I'm still a trainee. Since I started numerous other volunteers have started and dropped out along the way. The 2 young women from our bureau who did the course with me last June have also disappeared along the way. Because I'm waiting for hip surgery and am fairly immobile I've been doing telephone-answering for the last few months. After 2 1/2 years as a trainee I've now resigned.

Quite honestly, I think we are on a hiding to nothing. More and more is arriving at the door of CABx and although we have an up-to-date information system, not every human problem in the world is covered, and not everything has the kind of 'instant answer' that people expect. The local DSS office has closed, their functions are now carried out by the JobCentre Plus. People go there, get an answer, then come to CAB or phone us thinking they'll get a different answer. It frequently isn't possible! Bear in mind, also, that apart from the paid staff, the majority of people in CAB are unpaid volunteers. As one very experienced colleague said to me yesterday after she'd dealt with one particular client who just wouldn't take the answer she was given - 'why should we have to be spoken to like this, if we were getting paid for it, that would be one thing, but we're volunteers!'

My husband had similar experiences when he worked in a call-centre for an ISP. But at least, there he was dealing with fairly specific problems to do with computer service and he could deal with it, or escalate it to someone else. In CAB we can be asked anything - anything at all! 'How do I get my violent teenage son to leave home?' 'What are my rights under Spanish law if I split up with my Spanish boy-friend?' People are asking for miracles. We're also expected to be able to cope with any language in the world - to read documents in Kosovan, for instance! I would not have believed all this if I hadn't seen and heard it for myself.

I think the CAB are doing a fantastic job, but they are struggling against the tide. More and more questions and problems are coming which should be dealt with somewhere else, and often this is down to government offices closing, being amalgamated. Ofsted are being asked to take on more an more, yet many of their offices are being closed this year - I know, my daughter is one of those whose office will close. There's no prize for guessing where queries about e.g. school meals will come to!

There is this perception that the CAB can do everything for everyone - perhaps they should have as their motto 'Difficult we do at once, miracles take a little longer'.

Me, I am out of it, and I never even actually qualified. At least I have other things I can do. I've felt more and more disillusioned as the weeks went on, and for a while I carried on because of loyalty to colleagues, who are a great crowd, doing their very best for little or no reward. But yesterday when I came out and snapped at my husband, who didn't deserve to be snapped at, I realised I'd come to the end.

Sorry for the rant.

Aunty Margaret

Bossyboots

Aunty Margaret

You don't know how pleased I was to read your post setting out the issues with relation to the CAB. I know people on here try to help but I do get a bit fed up with constantly reading "go to the CAB". I know this is a money saving site but people do need to understand that in most cases if they want legal advice, they should go and see a professional and if necessary pay for it. The CAB does seem to be seen as a free source of all information as you have pointed out. The CABs in our area are now doing calculations to see if enquirers qualify for legal aid and are then referring them to local solicitors for the advice. Unfortunately, they have not yet grasped the fact that they need to send them to a specialist solicitor with a contract for the particular type of work so folks are trawling the high street trying to find someone to help.

Fran

Margaret,

Sorry to hear that the CAB didn't work out, I hope you find something more suitable soon if that's what you want to do.

I know what you mean about volunteers being "a great crowd" and some members of the public are rude. It's understandable (but still not forgiveable) when people have come to the CAB desperate because they have several problems which have built up or are suddenly in despair over unforeseen situations. In my experience of CAB most people have more than one issue to deal with when they turn up at the bureau or a complicated circumstance.

CABx should be properly funded. There is no way (I think) that you can get it to work well relying on volunteers who have a variety of reasons to be there and put in a lot of time and effort into helping clients but often their work doesn't get recognised properly even by their own bureau. I also think (but don't know the figures) that they will have lost a lot of volunteers who don't want to do all the extended training but just want to help out and could provide a very useful link between the initial client visit and the specialists.

The paid workers are also under a lot of pressure as CABx have to pass certain regular requirements in order to remain CABx or the title would be taken from them. That is as well as being specialists in whatever field - benefits, housing, employment or debt usually. Two paid workers left a bureau that I worked in because their mental health was affected by the continual pressure.

There is also the fact that the bureaux are managed independently and the managers don't even have to have a background of CAB work but often seem to get the job on management experience - not always the best person in my opinion and not always good at managing either.

Re the information system that they use - it is a huge system and does address a wide and enormous range of questions. There is also back up by phone from specialist advisors at Citizens Advice head office, so there is no reason (except for time and priority!) why any question should not get answered or the client be referred to the most suitable agency.

The main problem is cash going into the CABx, they seem to be scraping around for funding every year, the specialists are usually on short term contracts of 6 months to 3 years and sometimes even local councils don't put much money in. The amount of cash saved by the government through the work done by CABx is enormous, and there's also the Social Policy work that they do, drawing attention to local and national issues and contributing actively to getting policies changed.

Back to the original reason this was raised - each CAB is run individually and some are better than others, though the standard of advice will now be better from volunteers than it was pre 1999 and the new training. If you don't get calculations done (which is one of the first parts of training) then there is something wrong within that bureau and you should complain. Maybe the manager/staff wouldn't know that x volunteer wasn't giving out this help.

Fran

Bossyboots wrote:

Aunty Margaret

You don't know how pleased I was to read your post setting out the issues with relation to the CAB. I know people on here try to help but I do get a bit fed up with constantly reading "go to the CAB". I know this is a money saving site but people do need to understand that in most cases if they want legal advice, they should go and see a professional and if necessary pay for it. The CAB does seem to be seen as a free source of all information as you have pointed out. The CABs in our area are now doing calculations to see if enquirers qualify for legal aid and are then referring them to local solicitors for the advice. Unfortunately, they have not yet grasped the fact that they need to send them to a specialist solicitor with a contract for the particular type of work so folks are trawling the high street trying to find someone to help.

Often people need to know the facts and the CABx can provide this info. CABx have always (?) referred to solicitors where necessary, but often questions can be answered using CAB information system. People who visit CABx seem to have financial problems a lot of the time and just can't afford to go to solicitors and often too it is difficult to find eg. a solicitor who deals with benefits... the CABx deal with this all the time. The four main areas of work of CABx are debt, benefits, housing & employment so they are the best ones to go to for free advice. The thing is that people leave things until a crisis situation before going to CABx in the first place.

margaretclare

Hi Fran

Thanks for your response. We're perhaps a bit off-topic here, but what Bossyboots says is true. There is this extremely high expectation of what CAB can do. Some of the questions I've been asked on the phone have been unanswerable. What could I tell the man who's at the end of his tether with a violent son who he can't force to leave home? Son will be 18 soon and no one's responsibility. Neighbour problems? How can I get 2 neighbours to talk to each other and sort out about a new fence? The woman with the Spanish boy-friend and the child born in Spain more or less encapsulated all I was feeling about what I was trying to do, the frustration, the disillusionment. On the phone I told her we had no knowledge of Spanish law - she arrived in reception just before we closed, demanding to see a solicitor with knowledge of Spanish law, was flying back to Spain the following day, but she's been back since asking the same questions, and it's a 'what-if' scenario - what if I split up with him and he wants to keep the child in Spain? This really was a no-brainer.

I think that more and more is being pushed on to a service staffed mainly by unpaid volunteers, from the other funded services which are shrinking. If it's intended that it should be a place where any and all problems can be solved, then it should be fully-funded. Some of the paid staff are on short-term contracts funded by Lottery money, would you believe!

I have to thank CAB for one thing. Without them I wouldn't have sat through a seminar from the Skills for Life team, and wouldn't have been impelled to go and do a maths course with the object of getting involved in Adult Literacy. That's something that really interests me, that I really can do and will enjoy. I also made one good friend from it all - she has fibromyalgia too and joined CAB with the idea of getting back into a work-type scenario. Some of the younger ones, too, have used it as work experience, and the ones who're there the longest tend to be the older ones. Even they are not very happy because they've seen more and more, and more complicated, expected of them. Also they're not all happy about the move to computer-based information systems and typing all their case-sheets (not a problem for me).

We do have solicitors who run evening sessions, usually their appointments are booked weeks ahead, and even if they see someone, the person can come back and demand to know what's happening. We don't know and can't find out! This happened yesterday afternoon, and this woman just would not take 'no' for an answer. I didn't deal with her but I couldn't help hearing, and I thought 'I just don't want to go on with this'.

People often do leave things until a crisis situation. A good example is a woman I saw in December. She'd bought some clothes from a high street retailer on their storecard. And she'd never paid for them, was only doing agency work etc. I saw her the day before Christmas Eve, and the bailiffs were coming the following day! She would have had monthly storecard statements, reminders, letters, then a court summons, court judgment, and she did nothing until she got a letter saying the bailiffs were coming! We've also had people who've done nothing until the notice-to-quit arrived. These things do not happen overnight - months passed in which something could have been done.

I feel guilty at letting everyone down - I'm sure the younger ones who've been and gone do not feel guilty! I do, but I just don't want to continue with it.

The Sale of Goods Act 1979 - now, I'm really clued up about that! If it was all so straightforward, but it isn't.

Aunty Margaret