About Us

With effect from 1 April 2009 the six district Citizens Advice Bureaux in Cornwall merged into a single organisation known as CAB Cornwall. Although the governance of the operation has been streamlined our clients will not notice any difference in the high level of service they have come to expect and deserve from the CAB. You will find us at 10 Main Bureaux and 10 outreaches across the County. Please click on Bureau Finder in menu to left to show your nearest bureau.

Our Principles and Aims

CAB Cornwall, like the Citizens Advice service provides free, independent, confidential and impartial advice to everyone on their rights and responsibilities. It also values diversity, promotes equality and challenges discrimination.

Our twin Aims are to provide the advice people need for the problems they face, and improve the policies and practices that affect people’s lives, bringing to the attention of local and national government issues and problems which are of common concern to large numbers of people.

To support the increasing need for Social Policy development within the County, CAB Cornwall has an ongoing Campaigning for Change programme. Please click on Social Policy in menu to left for more detail.

Our Structure

Our staff and volunteers will continue to help people resolve their legal, money and other problems by providing free information and advice, and by influencing policy makers.

Volunteers are our key resource and inevitably more are needed to cope with the demand. We continue to place the highest emphasis on our training programmes both for new and existing volunteers and staff.

Advice Services

Now that our merger is complete we are working on our plans to make it easier for our clients to access the help we provide.

Our Telephone Access Centres in Redruth and Liskeard have greatly increased our ability to deal with telephone enquiries, and to build on this service we opened two new telephone advice centres based in Redruth and Saltash.

Many of our Bureaux are now opening longer hours to help our clients deal face to face with the problems related to the prevailing economic difficulties. We are developing our links with Inclusion Cornwall and other partners to tackle areas such as child poverty, family services, health issues, financial capability, community banking, housing and tenancies, debt and court desk provision.

We are also in close contact with Cornwall Council in connection with a CAB presence in the

One Stop Shops across Cornwall and with Jobcentre Plus to provide CAB advice from its offices.

During the year ended 31 March 2009 the CAB service in Cornwall was contacted by nearly 20,000 individual clients who raised over 63,000 issues. We expect to see these statistics increase significantly in the current year.

Campaigning and Policy Work

The Citizens Advice service doesn’t just exist to provide advice in times of crisis – we also campaign for changes to policy and practice that benefit millions of people each year by preventing problems arising in the first place.

Click here to see our partner organisations.