A CHANGE in the way Cumbria County Council allocates cash to Citizen Advice Bureaux will see offices in South Lakeland and Eden missing out on much-needed funds.

County councillors have agreed to change the formula by which grants to pay for money advice at nine offices around the county are worked out.

Instead of the allocation being based on local population it will in future be based on need, with the number of benefit claimants and County Court judgements taken into account.

The shift is set to hit the amount of grant offices at Kendal, Ulverston, Millom and Penrith will get from the county council while offices in Barrow, Carlisle, Whitehaven and Workington will benefit.

The Cumbria Rural CAB, based at Windermere, will also lose out.

County Coun Joan Stocker said the new definition of need ignored the working poor, the elderly and takes no account of rurality.

She said in the Rural CAB area there were many people on low wages and pointed out that South Lakes has the lowest mean average full time wage in the county according to a Cumbria Economic Intelligence Survey.

"Sliding into debt is just as easy for the working and retired poor as for the unemployed," she said.

"Family crises are not limited to the unemployed either and these frequently lead to debt."

Under the current arrangements, Kendal gets ten per cent, Ulverston seven per cent, Millom five per cent and Penrith ten per cent of the £221,370 (service level agreement) Cumbria County Council made available for CAB offices in 2000/2001.

Cumbria Rural CAB currently gets 11 per cent.

However, when the new formula to work out allocations is introduced in 2002/2003, Kendal will get 2.26 per cent, Ulverston 3.27per cent, Millom 2.26 per cent and Penrith 5.78 per cent of monies available.

Cumbria Rural CAB will get 3.33 per cent.

The chairman of Citizens Advice Cumbria and Cumbria Rural CAB, Tony Kent, told the Gazette that the change will have a knock-on effect to the detriment of all of the rural offices.

"It is rather unfair to use county court judgements as a base because all the work of the CAB is to try and stop county court judgements getting to court.

In other words, all the good work of CAB is being penalised in a way.

"Although they have not diminished the service level agreement, they have allocated more money to the west coast away from the rural areas and by so doing they have partly taken the view that there is not the need in the rural areas for these services.

"But the workload for bureaux in the rural areas shows positively that there is a need."