Current 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 the rollout of Universal Credit to be paused so that delays in the payment and processing systems can be resolved, both of which are causing enormous financial hardship to many claimants
- Improving debt collection practices for both Council Tax and mobile phone debt
- Raising awareness of problems with Personal Independence Payment claims (PIP)
Recent campaigns have resulted in the following changes:
- Employment Support Allowance – changes were made to the application form and to the support provided to better help vulnerable claimants
- Payday Loan companies became regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority
- Increased regulation of bailiffs, meaning all bailiffs now need to be trained and certified
- Universal Credit childcare support was increased by the government from 70 percent to 85 percent of childcare costs
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 and other statutory and voluntary organisations, attending forums and meetings
- We create public awareness of potential problems through social media and our newsletter
