Campaigns

The Citizens Advice service advises over two million people across the UK each year. With a wealth of evidence we are able to establish the issues which affect people’s lives locally, support national campaigns to help raise awareness, and lobby government and other regulatory bodies.

If you would like to know more about how you can get involved in our campaign work, please look at Volunteering.

We help our clients and people in North Tyneside by campaigning on their behalf. Our aim is to improve the policies and practices which affect people’s lives and create a fairer society.

Our clients face financial hardship, aggressive debt collectors, unscrupulous landlords, unfair employers and appalling customer service. They struggle with backlogs in the processing of benefit claims and often have no access to legal advice. Our aim is to prevent problems like this from re-occurring.

Our current campaigns include:

  • Fixing Universal Credit: campaigning for changes to the way Universal Credit is paid to make it easier for claimants to manage their money
  • Advocating for regulation of Baliffs to improve debt collection practices
  • Warning Consumers against the growing threat of scams and online fraud

Recent campaigns have resulted in the following changes:

  • A ban on letting agent fees for private rented tenants
  • Payday Loan companies became regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, halving the number of people needing our help with them
  • Improvment of debt collection practices across the mobile phone sector, including allowing customers to cap their monthly spending
  • The removal of fees for applying to employment tribunals

See https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/about-us/campaigns/campaign-successes/ for more details of these campaigns.

North Tyneside’s role in campaigning:

  • We feed in anonymous evidence to the central team at Citizens Advice to inform their campaigning work and highlight recurring issues for our clients
  • We highlight issues to MPs, councillors, policymakers, local media and other local agencies
  • We maintain a dialogue with the local council, attending forums and meetings
  • We create public awareness of potential problems through social media and our newsletter