Your Rights, problems and issues
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Campaign to protect workplace rights
Fareham CAB is supporting a national campaign to protect vulnerable workers from employers who deny them basic workplace rights such as paid holiday.
Every year, Citizens Advice helps hundreds of workers who have suffered cuts in holidays, working hours or rates of pay, in contravention of their legal rights or job contracts.
At Fareham CAB we have been seeing workers in the care, catering, retail, building, contract cleaning and food processing industries who may not even realise their rights, such as the national minimum wage (£5.93 per hour for workers of 21 or over) and paid holiday entitlement (20 days per year plus bank holidays for people working five days a week).
The Government is carrying out a review of how to make sure workers' rights are respected. Citizens Advice has welcomed this and called for the Government to create a single Fair Employment Agency to achieve it. This would combine existing employment rights enforcement bodies into a single new organisation.
Getting to grips with your budget
If you are finding it hard to manage your money, there is a useful new budgeting tool on the CAB website - www.adviceguide.org
The budgeting tool is an online calculator which helps you list all your household income and expenditure and draw up a household budget. You can also use it to work out how much you've got to pay off your non-priority debts -for example, personal loans, overdrafts or credit card debt. At the end you will be able to print off a financial statement which you can use to come to an agreement with your creditors.
If you are in arrears with your rent, mortgage, council tax or utility payments you should get advice from the CAB or other agency straight away.
Case Study
A client asked Fareham CAB for help after being repeatedly refused a basic bank account. As a result he had to be paid in cash. He also had to carry a lot of cash around to pay utility bills etc, which was both inconvenient and risky and caused him considerable stress.
The client had written off his debts via a Debt Relief Order last year, but this should not have prevented him from being granted a basic bank account. Fareham CAB advised the client to tell the banks that they were obliged under banking regulations to explain the reason for their refusal. Normally the only grounds for refusal are where an applicant has been convicted of fraud or is an undischarged bankrupt. Neither applied in this case and the client has now been successful in securing a basic bank account.
CAB now open at new Highlands Hub
Advisors from Fareham CAB are now available every Tuesday at the new Highlands Hub in Highlands Road, Fareham from 9.30am to 3.00pm.
We hope this extra service will make it easier for people living to the west of the town centre to drop in for advice.
We can help with a wide range of problems including employment, money advice, housing and benefits issues as well as consumer rights, family problems, legal matters and immigration.
Our regular Monday to Friday service at our main base on the top floor of Fareham library will continue unchanged.