Citizens Advice Bureau deliver services in over 3,300 community locations in England and Wales, run by 338 individual charities. Citizens Advice is also a registered charity and the membership organisation for the bureau. Together they are the Citizens Advice service, helping people resolve legal, money and other problems through independent and confidential advice, and by influencing policymakers. Citizens Advice undertakes quantitative analysis of the 7 million or so problems recorded in their client database each year, and undertake qualitative analysis of the 50,000 problems that bureau draw their attention to specifically.

They approached PBE for support with developing their economic evaluation capability and we assigned a team from Lloyds Banking Group to provide advice. In particular the volunteers were asked to assess whether Citizens Advice have or could obtain the data required to do economic analysis of different areas of work, using debt advice as an exemplar. The Lloyds team provided a framework for further work by Citizens Advice who are considering how best to develop their internal capability in the light of their current strategic priorities.

"The project with PBE and Lloyds allowed us to explore the detailed modelling required to establish the economic value of our service. This work was really beneficial in developing our knowledge and thinking in this space: crucially it highlighted that in order to produce meaningful modelling we needed to develop our evidence base further. This has led to the prioritisation of research to fill these evidence gaps and this work is now underway." Tamsin Shuker, Impact Manager, Citizens Advice

"The project with Citizens Advice was a great opportunity for a team of bank economists to think about some very different issues to their everyday work. We enjoyed working on the project, and look forward to seeing how Citizen's Advice take forward their efforts to develop their evidence base." Patrick Foley, Lloyds Banking Group

We are very grateful to the team at Lloyds - Patrick Foley, Emily Adler, Innes McFee and Andrew Pipe for their time and efforts in helping Citizens Advice.

5th November 2012