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.

The Scottish CAB service have seen payday loans as one of the fastest growing areas of work in the last year. This evidence report reveals case evidence and statistics from our 2013 payday loan survey.

Citizens Advice Scotland responds to The Royal Society of Edinburgh’s interim report of their inquiry into spreading the benefits of digital participation.

CAS has responded to the Financial Conduct Authority's consultation on how they approach achieving their objectives in regulating financial products.

CAS has issued a response to the Competition Comission's payday lending market investigation drawing on evidence from Citizens Advice Bureaux across Scotland and callers to the Citizens Advice Consumer Helpline.

Citizens advice bureaux, and a range of other community organisations, have reported a significant rise in the number of service users who are either struggling to afford adequate food or who are experiencing a crisis where they cannot afford food at all. A range of factors are causing this trend, including falling incomes, a rise in food prices, and benefit cuts. This represents a worsening of a situation where many families were already struggling to afford adequate food. The establishment of the new food body in Scotland represents a timely opportunity to address many of the wider food-related issues that particularly affect Scotland, including food poverty, poor diet, obesity and ill health.

Citizens Advice Bureaux in Scotland help hundreds of thousands of people with over half a million new issues each year. Snapshot uses evidence on these issues to act as an early warning system for government, service providers, and private sector companies, of where policies and practices are failing or inefficient. These monthly briefings use very recent evidence and are an excellent way of spotting trends to social policy and tracing the impact of recent policy changes.

This edition is based on the advice needs of clients who approached bureaux during January 2013.

Thank you to all bureaux for their feedback, without which this type of publication would not be possible.

In April 2013, the general consumer advocacy functions of Consumer Focus and the Office of Fair Trading’s responsibility for consumer-facing education will both transfer to the Citizens Advice service. This is part of an on-going series of reforms to the consumer landscape in which the Government intends for the Citizens Advice service to become the publicly-funded voice for consumers.

Citizens Advice Scotland welcomes the initiative from the Scottish branch of the Trading Standards Institute to address the problem of cold calling for the purposes of property maintenance and repairs.  This briefing uses the evidence from the Citizens Advice Consumer Service helpline to demonstrate the consumer detriment caused by such practices.