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What price advice?
We recentky saw a client who is a single parent that had sought advice on Welfare Benefit issues. Their only income at the time was approximatelly £70/week. A charge paying welfare advice organisation requested £30 as a deposit in order to help and more if successful. Client could have accessed advice through their Social LL free but appeared not to be aware of this. It is not clear if the organisation were aware of this either. The initial information from this organisation does not appear to indicate fees are charged. They also report they give free advice and information that is acessabke freely. This case raises several issues access to advice but also should we as advisors not have some form of accreditation and via this proffessional standards?
... should we as advisors not have some form of accreditation and via this professional standards?
Yes
Suspect I know this organisation and have regrettably crossed swords with them. They see little wrong with charging people on a low, fixed income and have offered a number of justifications as all such do. That’s actually at the very low end of what I have heard people could be charged. I think all you can do really is ensure that the client is clear that they have been given incomplete advice and charged unnecessarily. Word of mouth can be a powerful tool in these circumstances albeit that people in desperate circumstances will often continue to do desperate things.
Accreditation is an interesting one. What do you accredit? An organisation or the individuals in it? Does it make a difference?
You could accredit me today but six months from today I could have been off sick for three months and be hopelessly out of date. Accreditation would be checked but what’s the likely frequency? Annual is very unlikely. Every 3 to 5 years more likely. In practice then, what did the piece of paper mean?
The other side of that is that such things offer little real reassurance unless they come with some kind of indemnity attached for incorrect advice. That costs. In the current environment how likely is that?
I have been looking for a company to assess whether a security light needs a new bulb; a PIR repair or just a replacement. I didn’t realise there was accreditation. I found two local firms whose web sites were competent and made some good points. I would have happily gone with them as their charges looked reasonable. Mrs. H. pointed out there were a couple of ways such firms could be accredited and neither of the ones I had identified suggested they were accredited. Nor did they suggest they had indemnity insurance. I went with one she found nearby who indicated membership of an organisation which provided accreditation and that they had the appropriate expertise and insurance. A week later we’re still waiting for the courtesy of a response to our use of their very competent and professional looking contact form.
Accreditation is not the answer to this particular problem I’m afraid.
Specialist Quality Mark anyone??!!
Specialist Quality Mark anyone??!!
I couldn’t bring myself to be the one to say it :)
I think all you can do really is ensure that the client is clear that they have been given incomplete advice and charged unnecessarily.
There are two different assumptions here, and unlinked ones.
Chargeable advice is not necessarily bad advice. There is a tendency to have a two legs / four legs view of things which are not that clear. While there are bad chargeable services there are also good ones - even some which are worth paying for! There are also bad free services (probably some with quality marks). All advice services have always delivered different service depending, often, on the day of the week and who you see. The best that a quality process and intensive management and training can do is to minimise that difference.
The people that turn up at another service after using a chargeable one are likely to be those who are unhappy with the service they got. That may make them a bad sample. if it was their case that was weak, or it may be a pointer to something more worrying.
Let’s agree that good free advice is better than bad chargeable advice but also recognise that good chargeable advice may be better than bad free advice.
I agree Gareth.
I think the problem is that unlike- say- immigration advice (where accreditation is a requirement) anyone can set themselves up as a ‘benefit expert’.
As an example, there’s a notorious local character who, having been successfully prosecuted and fined for setting himself up as an ‘immigration specialist’ with no accreditation or qualifications, is now offering benefits advice at a considerable cost, presumably on the basis that he can’t be pulled over the coals for it. One of our more vulnerable clients paid him a large sum of money for an MR request which really wasn’t worth the paper it was written on (and then some).
I worry that in the current climate this sort of thing will become more prevalent but I suppose time will tell. We’ve had this debate many times and no doubt will do so again.
Client could have accessed advice through their Social LL free but appeared not to be aware of this.
This might not have been free advice. Some social landlords funds these services through rent. The client has is in effect already paid for this advice service.
‘This might not have been free advice. Some social landlords funds these services through rent. The client has is in effect already paid for this advice service.’
Its advice done via ourselves in partnership with SL. The ‘assistance’ from these characters appeared to consist of lodging an appeal without a MR. Which is a shame because the case had already been successfully and totally reconsidered by information the cl put in, and in true Jimmy Cricket style there is also more tales of woe.
I think all you can do really is ensure that the client is clear that they have been given incomplete advice and charged unnecessarily.
Let’s agree that good free advice is better than bad chargeable advice but also recognise that good chargeable advice may be better than bad free advice.
True, however there is an awful lot of bad, chargeable advice being provided; also if their statistics are to believed there is an awful lot of cherry picking going on. I admin an advice page on Facebook and it’s not unusual to hear of quite predatory practices in recovering fees and people with arguable cases being told they’ve no case, full stop!
Especially now that people are prevented from reclaiming ESA, people are being discouraged from pursuing appeals due to advice motivated by the possibility, or otherwise, of an arrears payment, and I think that’s quite a significant issue.
Agree with all posted after my original post. Like it or not though all of our perceptions on this matter are inevitably fueled by anecdotal evidence rather than hard stats. My own experience has been that paid services inevitably produce a proportion of cherry picking at some stage of the process and a competitive culture that deceptively and often dishonestly talks about “success” rates. I have yet to give anyone who talks about the success rate of themselves or their organisation anything other than very very short shrift. One interesting measure of that might of course be how many cases at the margins e.g. test cases, are taken/won at UT by organisations who charge relative to those who don’t.
The fall out from that approach is of course that people who have not made it through the cherry picking filter will aim themselves at free advice and, if that fails, will see us as the problem or, in the alternate, will believe that their failure to get through the cherry picking filter potentially erroneously means their case has no merit.
Free services can of course do the same but only the strongest tend to survive as their are too many eyes watching and word of mouth is a powerful thing, whereas in the paid sector that isn’t necessarily the case.
There are of course the wider questions of whether one believes advice should simply be free; the morality of charging people on fixed incomes and so on and the definition of success.
There’s also much blurred thinking on the matter. On the hand some people think there’s a place for paid advice but then kick off when government decides that they might consider, for example, charging for appealing to a tribunal!
[ Edited: 20 Oct 2016 at 09:28 am by Mike Hughes ]