Story: Lisa Swift
Advice Centres across the city are due to merge on 1st October as the Council changes the way they are funded.
Fourteen of the city's advice services have agreed in principle to take part in the merger, as the Council only intends to fund one organisation. Pitsmoor Citizens Advice Bureau and Sheffield Law Centre are planning to take part in the merger. Advice services at the Pakistan Advice and Community Association and the Yemeni Community Association are in a different position as advice is one of many different types of services they run and therefore they are not able to merge into the new structure. The Council has extended their current grants while discussions continue.
Chris Walker from Pitsmoor Citizens Advice Bureau provided the following information about the future of their service:
Over the last two years, advice centres across the city have been discussing how we were going to face up to a tougher future. In Pitsmoor CAB, we have seen a large increase in the number of people coming through our door. At the same time we have lost over half our funding.
The discussions with other advice centres are leading to merger – in future there will be one main advice centre serving the whole city. But that will not be the end of an advice centre in Burngreave. There are no plans to close our building and we will still be here doing the job we do.
We will be able to work much more closely with other advice outlets right across the city. If a person needs a specialist service or wants to visit an advice centre away from where they live it will be much easier.
We will also be upgrading our adviceline to make it more accessible. Also there will always be two advice centres open somewhere in the city from 9:00am to 5:00pm.
There will be some local changes to make this happen. From October our opening times for initial assessments will be:
Monday 9am – 1pm and
Friday 9am – 5pm
The Adviceline is open 9am–5pm
Telephone: 0114 205 5055