HELPING HANDS

CEO of Citizens Advice (CAB) for Bath and North East Somerset, Leslie Redwood 1977-1988 describes how the pandemic accelerated the charity’s plans to work with local partners to set up the Community Wellbeing Hub.

I have been working for Citizens Advice BANES since 2019 and, for some time before the pandemic, we had been talking to BANES Council, the region’s primary healthcare provider VirginCare, relevant NHS services, charities and volunteer groups about how we could combine our efforts to develop a more linked-up service for the local area. The COVID-19 pandemic provided the catalyst for us to pull this concept together and resulted in the creation of the Community Wellbeing Hub (The Hub).

As an independent charity, Citizens Advice provides free, impartial advice and information on a range of issues such as benefits, debt, housing, employment, consumer and family. The primary benefit of our involvement with The Hub was our ability to contribute to client-centred multi-disciplinary resolutions to individual needs. In short, we helped The Hub to become a one-stop shop for distressed residents. As the pandemic took hold last year we found that, instead of contacting us with quick queries, clients were presenting with far more complicated ‘root cause’ issues. By being able to work closely with our local Hub partners, it was possible to address these issues in a much more holistic way and to make a much greater long-term difference to our clients.

Through the ‘joined-up’ actions of The Hub, we have been able to give clients truly life-changing support. This includes helping people with addictions (and even those living in their cars) to be housed, to receive benefits and subsequently to enter employment, as well as helping people who have needed to shield for 12 months to receive support with their food and fuel supplies.

Working with our Hub partners, we were also able to build a business case to take to the energy redress scheme. This enabled CAB to access £100,000 of funding, which BANES matched with another £50,000, meaning we were able to distribute hundreds of energy top-up vouchers to BANES residents who needed help to reduce their gas and electricity bills. Another pressing issue is how digital poverty is affecting BANES residents. Information from The Hub is feeding into the research CAB is doing so we can help to find solutions to address this challenge.

As of April 2021, the three key partners involved in The Hub – BANES, VirginCare and third sector group, BANES 3SG – have directly helped over 12,500 families across the BANES area. This is an incredible achievement by the nine primary organisations involved and the 2,000 community volunteers who stepped forward to help with BANES 3SG. At CAB we are proud to have been a founding charity in The Hub and aim to build on partnership working for the future. It is now confirmed that the three key partners will continue to fund The Hub until at least Spring 2022, with the aspiration that it will become an integrated healthcare system across BANES in the longer term.

FUTURE PLANS

In May 2021, Les joined the Head Office of Citizens Advice to become the charity’s Strategic Lead for Welfare and Benefits. This new role sees him lobbying on behalf of clients nationally and managing relationships with the Department of Work and Pensions, focusing on universal credit, pensions and disability.