Advice services provide people with free and impartial advice on issues they face, from housing problems to the need to claim welfare benefits. Organisations like Citizens Advice and Shelter play a pivotal role in empowering individuals to make informed decisions, ensuring they are aware of their rights and connecting them with vital resources.

Receiving advice at an early stage can help prevent issues from escalating. For example, by seeking debt advice, a family can put their finances on a more sustainable footing before their financial problems become too severe.

However, knowing how many people would benefit from advice services is difficult. For example, if we only count the people who seek advice, we may miss people who didn’t know they could get advice or didn’t feel comfortable seeking it.

The Welsh Government is committed to supporting social welfare information and advice services and bases its advice services policies on an objective assessment of need. Within this framework, Alma Economics was commissioned by the Welsh Government to estimate current and future levels of advice need in each local authority in Wales.

Our analysis looked at five different categories of advice need: Welfare Benefits, Debt, Consumer and Finance, Housing and Neighbour, and Employment. The approach was to first estimate historical levels of need based on survey data and then to use this to explore how advice need has varied with macroeconomic and demographic factors such as population or wage growth. This information helped us estimate future levels of advice need based on publicly available forecasts.

For the analysis, we used data from the Understanding Society study, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Welsh Government, with which we created a panel of estimates of historical advice need by local authority, year, and category of advice. We then carried out multivariate regression analysis to explore the links between macroeconomic variables and advice need. Finally, we built a model to forecast future levels of advice need using forecasts of macroeconomic data and performed scenario analysis to understand how future changes might impact advice need.

Some of our key findings are presented below:

Total levels of advice need are high. We estimated that there are over 900,000 issues in Wales per year that could require advice. This represents more than one advice issue for every three adults in Wales.
Advice need is greater than current levels of provision. No single figure for the provision of advice services is available due to the number of different providers in this space. However, Citizens Advice Cymru, the largest single provider of advice services in Wales, supported 130,000 people in the year from May 2022 to May 2023.
Advice needs varied by category. Welfare advice needs were the highest, something which matches the demand that advice providers are already experiencing. However, debt, housing, employment, and consumer issues still affect many people.

This research will inform Welsh Government policy around advice services, including future discussions of funding.

Our report is available here.

Estimating current and future levels of advice need in Wales