If you think students spend all their spare time avoiding studying, going out with their mates and having a good time then you'd be right. Well our student bloggers do anyway. While they assure us they don't slack on the study, they've got a lot to answer for when it comes to enjoying themselves while volunteering.

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Thursday Jan 08, 2009

Happy New Year: Wishing you bail-outs and not bankruptcies!

 

So Christmas and New Year are out of the way, and we are now faced with the 2009 calendar, full of little empty white boxes waiting to be filled in.

  I have been living back in Scarborough over this Christmas break and unfortunately I haven’t being doing much volunteering over the past few weeks. I started to practice the art of student-laziness-during-holiday-periods. To counter the huge amount of work I managed to do over term-time, obviously......

  However, my local Citizen’s Advice Bureau (CAB) re-opened their doors on 5 January and I have been volunteering there over the past few days. I am still training to be an adviser, but finally I can see some kind of progression and I am enjoying it so much more because of this.

Every now and then at the CAB you stumble upon little trinkets of surprising information which enlighten you to one aspect of the world.

This week I was looking up Attachment of Earning’s Orders – which is basically where the government gets a court judgment allowing them to take money directly out of a person’s income, through that person’s employer. This is in order for that person to repay any debts owed to the government (for instance Council Tax arrears).

The catch comes where a person has been making payments through his/her employer for some time, but then his/her employer ceases to trade and therefore cannot make more payments to the government.

In such instances some local authorities may apparently argue that the client has to start from the beginning again, repaying all the money that s/he has already repaid, as well has the rest. A re-re-payment.

Who said the government wasn’t draconian?  

  Unfortunately I cannot talk too much about what I have been doing there, as the service is completely confidential, but If you’d like to help advising people with problems such as this then I am sure most bureaux would be more than happy to train new advisers, with some opportunities listed on the do-it database, and further information on the CAB website.

 In the Scarborough Bureau, and I assume nationwide, there has been a big increase in the amount of clients coming in to the CAB with debt problems, often caused by the backlash from the current economic climate, so the more volunteers the better.

 

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Anyway, I’ll be returning to the icy cold of my student house in Sheffield next week and I am looking forward to continuing my volunteering back in South Yorkshire. It’s interesting to have almost two different lives in two different places.

Despite this, I will probably be cutting a figure of considerable rancour throughout the next four weeks, whilst my exams and the lack of heat conspire to break any springtime optimism I may be encountering.

Have a good 2009.

Posted by Harry ( 5:22 PM )
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