Top requests to Citizen Advice are for council tax and credit card help

Over 300,000 households across the UK are projected to turn to Citizen Advice for advice on how to pay down their debts. The two main needs from clients are for finding a solution to council tax payments as well as credit card bills. While those are the top two reasons for people contacting the agency, the organisation also receives a wide range of requests for many other needs.

Even with the lower unemployment rate, many households across the UK are still struggling. Weekly earnings are still only slowly increasing and households are struggling with paying all of their bills since wages are mostly flat. As just one example to show this, households are faced with energy bills that are over 200 per cent higher then before the recession started. Food prices are also rapidly increasing, and rents are going up at around 5 per cent per year.

Many people are still turning to Citizen Advice because of that. This is occurring even when considering the slowly improving economy. So while experts still continue to think the number of people facing financial difficulties will continue to decrease, it is a slow process and will not happen overnight.

What households are seeking from Citizen Advice

The most common request for help is for council tax. The number of people seeking support will be increasing over 20 per cent for the upcoming year, and almost 200,000 households need advice for this. The cause of this is from the benefit changes that the government made back in 2013.

Local authorities are now responsible for creating their own schemes to help the vulnerable and people in poverty deal with council tax. The increasing number of people turning to Citizen Advice show that those changes did not work. In fact, information from Institute of Fiscal Studies as well as Citizen Advice show that the number of people seeking help for the first time has increased by almost 40 per cent.

Not only are the local authorities responsible for providing support to the vulnerable for their tax, but there has also been a 10% reduction in funding to the council tax schemes. So this means there are fewer assistance programmes available to the vulnerable, and it also reduced the number of cousellors that can provide advice. So households are being hit with challenges from multiple places.

The number two request is for credit card arrears. While around 150,000 households will be seeking assistance for credit card debts, this is a decrease from previous years. It has been reduced by about 10 per cent. A major reason for this is the very low interest rates and competition among banks.

People are still paying for goods on their credit cards as they are struggling to balance their budgets. Staff from Citizens Advice can help these individuals as well. All solutions will be explored in an effort to end this cylcle.