Social Policy

The second aim of the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) service is to:

This means that we question policies, services and practices that we think are unjust or unfair and we try to get them changed. We do this by using the experiences of our clients, but without breaking our client confidentiality.

Sometimes we identify an underlying problem while we are helping an individual client. For example, a client may want to cancel a consumer agreement, and while we are advising on this we notice that one of the terms of the agreement is unfair. We can discuss this with the company who issued the agreement and if we are still not satisified we might report the matter to Trading Standards or the Office of Fair Trading.
In this way we can help other people as well as the individual who came into the Bureau.

We can undertake social policy work both locally and nationally. There are over 700 Citizen Advice Bureaux (CABx) in England and Wales so if we all work together we can collect a lot of evidence on how particular policies affect ordinary people.

The National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux (NACAB) can collect evidence from all the bureaux in the country and use it to prepare reports. The National Association lobbies other organisations and the Government to bring about the change.