Publications

The number of Scots falling victim to financial rip-offs is increasing dramatically. A special helpline set up by CAS to deal solely with consumer issues saw a 14% increase last year in calls about scams.

Leading charities gathered in the Glasgow City Chambers for The Working Together to Tackle Poverty Conference in March 2014.

Advice in Scotland 2012/13 is Citizens Advice Scotland’s state of the nation report on the problems that people are experiencing across the country. 

CAS has submitted evidence on food parcels to the Welfare Reform Committee ahead of an oral evidence session on the 29th April 2014. 

Claiming sickness and disability benefits can be a stressful process, and many bureaux clients feel that the medical assessments for the benefit do not reflect their difficulties. 

They often feel they need additional evidence from their doctor to demonstrate the true picture, but getting this evidence and having it considered can be difficult and costly.

The Scottish CAB service has been campaigning on the issue of unfair delivery charges for the past four years.

In 2014 Consumer Futures commissioned Verco and Cambridge Econometrics to assess the social, environmental and macroeconomic impact of investing carbon tax revenues in energy efficiency programmes for fuel poor households in Scotland. It follows on from a similar UK-wide study commissioned by Consumer Futures in 2012 that demonstrated that investing money raised through carbon taxes into household energy efficiency creates more jobs and growth than other kinds of major government investment or tax cuts, in addition to delivering environmental and social benefits. The 2014 report that can be downloaded below focuses specifically on assessing and quantifying these benefits within the Scottish context.

As a member of the Scottish Fuel Poverty Forum, Citizens Advice Scotland is working closely with the Scottish Government and other organisations to ensure that, so far as is reasonably practicable, no-one in Scotland is living in fuel poverty by November 2016. 

The Scottish Fuel Poverty Forum published it's final report on its review of the Scottish Government's fuel poverty strategy in March 2014. This included a number of recommendations, covering a range of issues that the Forum identified as needing to be acted upon if fuel poverty is to be eradicated by November 2016. Amongst others, these included recommendations on how the government can prioritise: areas of wider poverty and deprivation; fuel poor households who live remote from the gas grid and in harder to treat properties; and improving understanding of the links between fuel poverty and health or other social benefits. 

CAS is supportive of the Scottish Government’s drive to eradicate fuel poverty in Scotland and has signed up to all of the recommendations contained in the final report.

In 2011/2012, bureaux across Scotland advised on almost 52,000 housing issues which represented a spectrum of housing-related problems from access to a tenancy, to problems with the condition of a property, neighbour problems and repossession.