Post by Richard Wilkinson on Mar 11, 2012 16:43:56 GMT
Hi Folks
We are running a live twitter day this Tuesday 13th March to anyone who is interested can see what a Social Welfare Advice agency such as a CAB in an average type of town with i guess pretty normal problems. Here is the twitter message from Bolton CAB twitter.com/#!/boltoncab/status/178176488791752704
follow @boltoncab twitter.com/#!/boltoncab for more details
Post by nickd (Mylegal) on Mar 11, 2012 17:21:39 GMT
Hi Rich,
Will try and tweet it out as much as possible (subject to not being otherwise chained to my desk!). Just an idea, any video footage which could be tweeted via YouTube? It needn't show your clients, just advisers and so forth?
Rich, Bolton CAB's Twitter day was raised yesterday by Lord Bach in the House of Lords in his speech on the Legal Aid bill and the telephone gateway yesterday-see link to Hansard posted today.
This is what Lord Bach said in the House of Lords yesterday "The Bolton CAB is a large CAB which covers all these fields and has a legal aid contract. It runs an advice surgery from time to time. Yesterday it tried an experiment. Every client who came in had their tale told in general terms by way of a tweet, in other words on Twitter, so that one could read each one of these cases during the course of the morning and afternoon while this surgery lasted. One could see from reading these how the world of a busy CAB or law centre or advice centre actually worked in practice. There were 126 clients who sought legal advice on social welfare issues and they covered practically everything that you could think of. I have no doubt that some of those clients were well able to make a telephone call and start proceedings in that particular way, and I am an undisguised fan of telephone advice when it is appropriate. But are the Government really saying, as I suspect they are, that all 126 of those clients would have been able to do this? Are they saying it is not highly advantageous to have face-to-face contact in some cases? And are they really saying that someone who turned up to a CAB should be turned away and told to call a hotline, as will happen unless this amendment is passed? Can you think of a more bureaucratic, fussy and less efficient system and one that is less reflective of the way people actually live their daily lives? I would argue that it is an absurd proposition which is un-British in the sense that it is one-size-fits-all and too dirigiste and inflexible an approach."
