Birmingham’s five Citizens Advice Bureau offices will close their doors next month unless the charity can raise £50,000 per month to keep them open.
Offices in the city centre, Kingstanding, Tyseley, Handsworth and Northfield will close on February 11 after the city council cut all of the charity’s £600,000 funding.
It means that 56,000 people who last year called on the service for free debt counselling, benefits help and other advice will be left without a free open-door CAB service.
Chief executive Yvonne Davies said: “At a time of austerity our independent free advice is needed more than ever.
“We have been left with no alternative that doors will have to close unless we can find additional funding. We cannot stay open for four months waiting for this money.
“This is not what central Government had in mind when it talked about the Big Society. They did not want councils to take the easy option by cutting funds to voluntary groups.
“Some of the most vulnerable people in Birmingham will lose out.”
The charity, which opened its first Birmingham office in 1939, predicts a huge increase in people suffering from debt, homelessness and marriage breakdown if the service is not saved and has issued a plea for funding.
As the largest Citizens Advice Bureau in the country, as well as five open door services it also provides a telephone helpline, outreach services at 34 GPs surgeries, five hospitals, five children’s centres, HMP Birmingham, and works with Macmillan Cancer Support, the Working Age Dementia Advice and County Court homelessness projects.
These will remain open but are also at risk if the offices remain closed.
CAB’s income of £3 million in 2009/10 will fall by £1.8 million next year, including the £600,000 council grant.
The council funding ends on March 31 and a replacement Birmingham City Council fund, from which CAB can bid, will not be available until August at the earliest. Already 45 staff and 150 volunteers have been told their jobs are at risk.
It is a bitter blow as CAB, staffed largely by volunteers, was supposed to pick up the workload following the cutting of the Government funded Consumer Focus service and Birmingham City Council’s in-house debt advice team.
A city council spokeswoman said: “We’ve always made it clear to agencies that funding was not guaranteed beyond any single year, up to a maximum of three years.
“It was never our intention for agencies to become dependent upon this source of funding, or that it form their sole source of income. However, we did pay CAB £150,000 notice payment.
“The council’s contracts with the current providers ceased in March 2010. A funded notice period of 90 days was in place to provide some protection for the providers. Individual meetings are being held with the service providers to engage them with the recommissioning process.”
Labour opposition spokesman Ian Ward (Shard End) said: “We tried to stop this. The amount of money being sucked out of the voluntary sector makes a mockery of the Big Society project.”