Oldham Citizens Advice Bureau

General information

The Citizens Advice service provides free, independent,
confidential and impartial advice to everyone on their
rights and responsibilities. It values diversity, promotes
equality and challenges discrimination. The service aims
To provide the advice people need for the problems they
face and to improve the policies and practices that affect
people’s lives.
Contact from clients can be made by attending our open
door drop in session, reception, by appointment, by
telephone or written enquiry, our generalist advisers are
presented with a range of issues and frequently multiple
enquiries per client, ranging in nature and complexity.
We empower clients through advice about their options
and increase knowledge of their rights, often enabling
clients to take action to achieve desired outcomes
themselves. Where clients cannot take action we take on
cases and pursue the outcome the client seeks. Clients
largely arrive through the open door service for a triage
interview with one of our Gatewayers, who consider
which of the bureau’s range of services are appropriate
for each individual client. Generalist advice may be
needed, assisted information, a referral or signpost.
This year we received funding from the government to
increase our opening times. We ran Additional Hours
Advice from April 2010 until the end of March 2011 and
seeing 1170 additional clients due to increased opening
times. For 2010/2011 the core service dealt with 7606
new issues. The main areas being debt, benefits
employment and housing In addition to the advice from
our advisers, Tameside CAB host a number of specialist
advice sessions in the bureau allowing the people of
Tameside quick and easy access to specialists in the field
of family and matrimonial law, welfare benefits,
employment, housing, debt, immigration, community care
and insolvency.
Our huge thanks go to our volunteers without whom we
would be unable to provide the service at the level we
do. Our team gave 4973 hours of their time to provide
Tameside clients with service, high in quality and
comprehensive in nature.