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Summer 2016                          Unsubscribe from this list
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Message from the CEO
 

I am delighted to announce that following our assessment we have been awarded the PQASSO Quality Mark at Level One. The assessment uses a quality system that is endorsed by the Charity Commission.



It has taken a year of hard work, reviewing what we do in 12 areas:

1. Planning
2. Governance
3. Leadership and management
4. User-centred service
5. Managing people
6. Learning and development
7. Managing money
8. Managing resources
9. Communications and promotion
10. Working with others
11. Monitoring and evaluation
12. Results

The process enabled us to review what we do well and not so well, and provided us with the opportunity to implement the necessary improvements where we needed to. This award demonstrates a high standard of quality throughout the organisation which we will need to maintain over the next 3 years, whilst we work towards the next level.

This is a fantastic achievement for CaSSCA, and enabled the entire organisation to work together as a team to demonstrate our serious commitment to improving quality in all areas of the organisation. 

During the last quarter, we also identified the need to strengthen our leadership capacity and have restructured the Senior Management Team and Service Delivery teams to reflect this, and enable us to work towards our 5 year strategy. 

Thank you to all CaSSCA staff and volunteers for your continued hard work. Now we can look forward to the next challenge!


Julie Martin
We delivered two workshops at Adur & Worthing Council's Employability Network at their Making Changes event for local people either looking for work or preparing to return to work. Volunteer coordinator Carolyne Smith explains:

I was asked by the Employability Network if I could deliver two workshops at their Making Changes Event in June. The workshops were for people who had been out of work for a long time, and I decided to base the workshop around my own personal success in achieving a complete career change and how I felt I owed this directly to my own volunteering. I coupled this with talking about reasons for volunteering, what to consider before finding the right role/organisation, what skills people can develop and what people can expect from an organisation when they volunteer.



The talks were very well received by around 35 people and I was complimented by several delegates afterwards, saying they found the workshops interesting and inspiring. Another charitable organisation has asked to borrow my brief to deliver the workshop to their users. Fingers crossed we now see an increase in volunteer applications for Worthing!
Recent great outcomes we have achieved for our clients

Lancing got £1,311 for a client's visa application flowing an application on her behalf the Alchemy Charitable Trust. Their generosity will allow the mother of a British born child stay in the country with him until he turns 18. 

Brenda in Horsham found that a client's severely autistic son hadn't been receiving the Disability Living Allowance care component when he was home from school since August 2014. Following our help, the payments, amounting to almost £4,000 were backdated.

Mavis in Crawley with the help of the Free Representation Unit helped a client win her appeal for Personal Independence Payment. The client has been awarded enhanced personal care and standard mobility, amounting to £5413.20 per annum until 2019.

Fiona in Horsham saw a client whose current income totals £155.09 a week £128.75 a week from cleaning work, plus £26.34 pension from her late husband’s employers West Sussex County Council. Her essential expenditure, including £50 a week for food, laundry and personal items, rent, council tax, fares etc worked out at about £164. 
 
She and her husband married in 2005, & lived with his father until his father died in 2013, leaving them both homeless and in debt. We were helping them both but her husband died completely unexpectedly in 2014. She had to wait several weeks for a post-mortem to be issued for a full death certificate. Bereavement Benefits told us, incorrectly, that an interim death certificate was not sufficient to claim. Further delay in processing her claim meant she did not receive any  bereavement allowance  until March 2015 when she received a backdated payment. CenSus therefore said she had been overpaid Housing Benefit and Council Tax Reduction following her husband’s death, and the Housing Benefit overpayment was £1033.86 We appealed (official error of Bereavement Benefits office) and asked Horsham District Council to use their discretion not to recover the overpayment, but did not succeed in either. CenSus has been deducting £5 a week from her current Housing Benefit entitlement since April this year, despite our sending them details of her ill health resulting from diabetes, and her financial statement, so the last resort was applying to suitable charities.Talisman Charitable Trust came through for our client. 

Debt Caseworker Sara and volunteer advisers Christine and Hillary in Burgess Hill saw a 70 year old client who had lived in her home since 1981. Her housing association were looking to evict her because she had over £5,000 in rent arrears and a problem receiving her Housing Benefit. With a week to prepare for court, a last minute Housing Benefit payment reduced the arrears to over £2,000 (confirmed only the day before court). As a result, the client can remain in her home despite initial advice from her housing association. 

Debt and homelessness prevention caseworker Jan Williams saw a client aged over 60, who was left in considerable debt by her former husband. A referral was made for a debt relief order and £12900.05 was written off following its completion. The client can remain in her home as a result. 

Homelessness prevention caseworker and Horsham supervisor Kate Shillingford saw a client who was street homeless, having been evicted from her leasehold flat for failing to pay the ground rent and service charges due to mental health problems. Following our help, the client was allowed back in to her property following a settlement with her creditor. However some legal work is still needed on the lease and our support is continuing.

Employment Caseworker Martin Phillips saw a client who had been dismissed for gross misconduct. She had requested an appeal but the employer ignored her. We intervened and the employer then agreed to hear the appeal. We advised the client on how to present her appeal. The dismissal was overturned and the client now has her job back.

Advisers Lorraine in Shoreham and Wendy in Lancing both received flowers from very grateful clients:

Research and Campaign News

We continue to focus on local actions which are relevant to the communities we serve. 
Housing problems continue to feature frequently. We have recently reported on problems with access to the homelessness service in Adur & Worthing and received a very positive response from their Director of Communities. We are now compiling similar reports on Horsham and Crawley.

We have also had positive feedback from Mid Sussex DC to the report compiled in May on the performance of Census in delivering housing benefit and council tax services to their residents. They said that “As the report states, the level of error in our administration of Housing Benefit remains too high, and this is at the root of many of the individual issues highlighted.  We are committed to improving the service received by our customers and this report gives us good examples that we can use when training staff.”   A copy of the report was also sent to Horsham DC and a response is awaited.

Citizens Advice head office have produced useful guidance re influencing Local Authorities, including their approach to pursuing council tax arrears. We plan to approach various councils to encourage them to sign up to a good practice protocol, using client stories to  illustrate where they are falling short of this good practice.

We have completed  a research project on self-employment, exploring people’s experiences relating to tax and in-work benefits;  ‘bogus’ self- employment;  and access to pensions advice and provision.  We will now use the information to produce an information  leaflet  to be handed out in our centres and promoted  via social media.
 
A joint project with Arun & Chichester CA, on the subject of personal independence payments (PIP) has just begun. Our findings will feed into a Forum in November, where we will work with partners such as MIND to discuss our approach to the problems identified and how we may best assist our various clients.

Volunteer Assessor Dennis in Crawley became our first ever research and campaigns champion of the month for raising the issue of Job Centre Plus offices sending clients with mental health problems to Citizens Advice for issues that they ought to be helping with. In the coming months we will be carrying out research into problems in accessing benefits and services on the part of people with mental health difficulties. We envisage that various reports may result from this – for example, to the DWP and to Local Authorities. Dennis wins a mug and his contribution will lead to improvements for Job Centre Plus users with mental health problems. 


 

Service news

July was Scams Awareness Month, a scheme run by Citizens Advice in association with Trading Standards. The aim is to empower our clients to spot, share experiences of, and report scams.

We had a stall at the Sainsburys in Crawley and the Holmbush Centre in Shoreham in association with West Sussex Trading Standards, and Liz Chesters spoke in Worthing to a group of clients of Red Assure Independent Living, who provide telecare. Liz spoke about the key messages of Scams Awareness month, talked about common scams and invited the audience to share any scams they knew about. 

Horsham saw a 95 year old ex RAF WW2 veteran who was very concerned about the behaviour of a doorstep trader. The client refused the trader's services and refused to agree to anything, but was left under the impression that the trader would still return to work on his drive. 

A referral to West Sussex Trading Standards saw them contact the client, offering practical help, including the offer to deliver advice leaflets and door stickers to the client and his neighbours. Trading Standards will also think about ways to get the driveway blocked so if the trader does return, he can't begin work without the client's knowledge. A referral was also made to Sussex Police, who told the client to call them on the emergency number if the trader returns and tries to begin unsolicited work on the drive.
Update on the quality of our advice assessment (QAA)
 
All centres have to go through a Quality of Advice Assessment (QAA) as part of the Performance and Quality Framework (PQF) as a requirement of our membership agreement with Citizens Advice. These assessments look at the client journey and the quality of the advice that they receive. 
 
Each month we randomly select cases (Gateway or Advice) from across all channels and work We have a clear objective to deliver good quality, accurate and appropriate advice and to consistently score a 3 with all contacts with the client. CaSSCA has achieved the following scores so far this year. 
 
Apr-16 May-16 Jun-16
68% 80% 80%
 
Disappointingly CaSSCA & Arun & Chichester Citizens Advice contract to deliver Healthwatch ended at the end of June. The Independent Complaints Advocacy Service, ICAS, continues to be delivered by CaSSCA until the end of September, after which the new provider will take over delivering this service from the 1st October. Further details will be available on the Healthwatch West Sussex website.

We continue to support health and social care issues within our generalist service. If you have any concerns, please call into your nearest Citizens Advice or phone our Adviceline on 0344 477 1171. 
EU Referendum News
 
To maintain our impartiality, Citizens Advice has taken a neutral position on the referendum. It is our role to be a source of impartial advice on what the outcome means for people.
 
While the British public has voted to leave the European Union, it is not yet fully clear what this will mean for people’s day to day lives and it will be some time before it happens.
 
People do get specific rights from being a member of the EU, including employment rights, consumer rights and benefits entitlement. These won’t change immediately. It’s reasonable to expect the government to legislate as a result of leaving the EU. Until this happens it is difficult to say precisely what impact it will have.
 
However, we have seen an increase in demand for our services as people have questions about what the outcome means for them. In the month following the referendum, the number of immigration enquiries to our service more than doubled on the same period the previous year. 
 
Nationally, Citizens Advice will work with government to make sure that the voices of our clients, consumers, witnesses and the service are heard.
 
Our service continues as a neutral independent provider of advice and we have never been more important. Looking forward we will continue to use our evidence to influence and help ensure the best outcomes for people and the community. 
Benefit Cap Changes

The Welfare Reform and Work Act (2016) introduces some changes to the benefit cap. These changes, which will take effect in autumn 2016, include changes to the benefit cap levels to £23,000 a year for couples with or without children and lone parents and £15,410 for single people without children in Greater London, and £20,000 and £13,400 respectively for those groups elsewhere in Great Britain. They also include additional exemptions for recipients of Guardian’s Allowance, Carer's Allowance and Universal Credit claimants who receive payments towards carer’s costs.
 
For more information about the benefit cap changes please visit www.GOV.UK/benefit-cap
 
One of our Crawley based advisers, Mavis attended the Queen's Garden Party at Buckingham Palace in June. Mavis was nominated to the event for her charity work by West Sussex Deputy Lieutenant Daphne Anthony, herself a former Crawley volunteer. Mavis has been with Citizens Advice for over 10 years following her retirement in 2005. 

Welcomes, Goodbyes and Congratulations

Welcome to Liz Gearing.

Liz is our new Learning and Development adviser. Liz has a wealth of experience as a volunteer adviser, Citizens advice contract worker, supervisor and most recently as a training Supervisor working in the Waverley district.We wish her a warm welcome. Liz will be based in Shoreham with the L&D team but will be visiting all our local offices over the next few months.

We would also like to send a very warm welcome to our newest volunteers who have joined us since April:

Pauline, Shabana, Lisa & Jean in Crawley
Sabina in East Grinstead
Jack, Kelly & Guy in Haywards Heath,
Catherine, Florence, Dawn, Linda, Sue & Denise in Horsham
Abigail, Toni, Kate & Gwenda in Shoreham
Graham in Worthing
 
We also say goodbye to Adviser Maggie and receptionist Kaye in Crawley and Team Leader Hayley Mann, with our best wishes to all of you in your future endeavors. 

Congratulations to Frances and Ita in Burgess Hill and Jenny in Crawley, all of whom qualified as advisers, and Gateway Assessors Phil, Paul and Stephen in Burgess Hill, Mandi in East Grinstead and Heather in Lancing, who have all received their certificates.

Congratulations also to Employment Caseworker Martin Phillips and head of our Research and Campaigns team, Liz Chesters. Both were nominated for awards at the Citizens Advice national conference.

We couldn’t offer any of our services without the generosity of time and effort that our volunteers give and the dedication of our paid staff. My thanks to you all. 
Getting out and about
 
We attended the Burgess Hill Summer Fayre to mark the Queen's birthday celebrations and the HMRC Wellbeing Day, where we spoke to employees about how Citizens Advice could help them. We also spoke at the staff meeting of the Burgess Hill Town Council Help Point team about Citizens Advice and the services we offer. We had a stall at Sparks in the Park in Horsham, where we promoted our services and advertised for volunteers. The children's events we organised for the day prompted one young visitor to remark that we had the best stall at the event. We were also at the Worthing Lions Festival, where our office bear was won in our raffle by Anthony, who promised to give him a loving home. 


 


This year’s Chichester Legal Walk will set off at 5.30pm from Chichester Crown Court on Tuesday September 13th.

Last year, walkers raised almost £8,000 for local Citizens Advice services, including us. The walk is about 10km (6 miles) and should take 2 hours to complete. Volunteers are welcome to bring friends and family members and the route is dog friendly. We will be finishing at the Fountain Pub for a free drink.

Please do take a look, and sign up for what promises to be a great evening in aid of a cause we all believe in.

Sign up by emailing us, or if you'd like to sponsor us, you can do so at our donation page. Please give generously.

Date for your diary: Conference 2016

The initial planning meetings for this year's conference have been held and a survey  carried out to capture feedback and find out what staff and volunteers want from the day. There was an excellent response from volunteers across the organisation, and the answers have been fed into the planning process.

As a result of the meetings, the conference has been scheduled for Tuesday 15th November at the County Ground in Hove. The event will provide a great opportunity for us to work together to improve the lives of the West Sussex community. Look out for your invitation. 
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