So this week I was finally allowed to answer the phones at the Citizens Advice Bureau. It doesn't sound that great but it's nice to finally be given a bit more independence, after having to sit and listen to other people taking the calls. Although the only downside was that the first person I had calling was a polish person, so it was hard to spell her name correctly, especially as the telephone line isn't great!
Nevertheless, no matter how limited my independence there has been, I've still found it very interesting. Obviously I'm learning lots about law but it's teaching me a lot about society, and the injustices still present in society, and it's making me question the way some things are in the English legal system. Most of what the office of the Citizens Advice Bureau that I work in deals with is employment, debt, and housing issues, but it varies with each office of the CAB because it really depends on the issues that are more predominant in the town/region where the CAB office operates.
The enquiries that are most complicated to deal with, are enquiries relating to employment, because whether their employer is in the right or the wrong depends largely on the contract that they are under, and so we often have to give them an appointment so that someone can review their employment contract and work out whether they have a valid claim.
What I have found so far by working at the CAB is that quite a few of the people who come to the office with problems, have often gotten themselves into the particular problem because they haven't done some of the simplest things. For instance, the first call I ever listened to was from a woman who was facing a repossession order because she lived/lives in social housing and she hadn't kept up with her rent payments. The reason that she hadn't kept up with these payments was in fact because she had become a self-employed worker, and so she could no longer afford her rent payments but in reality all she needed to do was ring up the authorities and tell them that she had become self-employed and then she would have received more housing benefit to help her with her rent payments.
Another case that I still remember very clearly, is the case of a woman who had lent her friend a large sum of money, which the friend was refusing to give back. The background to the story was that her husband had had a stroke and she became friends with this woman after this had happened because the woman's husband had worked in the same business as her husband, and after her husband had the stroke, the woman did lots of things to help her such as picking her grandson up from school, etc. But then one day this friend said that she needed financial help, and so she lent her all or the majority of her life savings (£10,000). But when she started asking her for the money back the friend would not reply to her in any way or form, and she appeared to have used this "emergency" money to buy a house. She tried to get her lawyer and the police involved because it was essentially a case of theft at this point but because she had no proof that she had even given this friend the money, apart from the friend confessing that she had borrowed this money from her, there was nothing they could do and she couldn't take it to a small claims court because they don't deal with claims that exceed £5,000. I don't know whether she gave the friend the money in cash or as a cheque, but it's crazy to think that she wouldn't have even had this problem, if she'd just made out a cheque and spent 5/10p photocopying it, and perhaps made the friend sign a written agreement that she would pay back the money.
The other case that has contributed to this point of view was the case of this woman, whose husband had lost his job. She called us because they were trying to just pay for everything by living off their savings and the money was beginning to run out, and they had quite a lot to pay for because they had a mortgage and some loans/credit card debts. But they could have solved this problem by taking simple steps because what her husband should have done was signed up for Job Seeker's Allowance and what they should have done was call the bank, and credit card/loan companies they had debts with to explain that they had less income coming in and would have to pay less money back to them each month.
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