Today I went down to the Crawley CAB’s Annual General Meeting. Usually I cannot make it as it is held on a Friday lunchtime, but I happen to have a couple of days off this week and could therefore attend – now that I am standing down as a trustee.

This year’s annual report has an interesting way to demonstrate the good which the CAB does for Crawley, and specifically for Broadfield. Everyone knows it is a good thing, but it is hard to quantify the work which is done. This year’s report makes a stab at that. In the section about the Debt Relief function it says that 75% of all enquiries to the CAB about debt was related to credit debt. In terms of results, the CAB got £607,324 of clients’ debts written off and £168,157 deferred beyond current payment terms.

In Broadfield there is an outreach service in association with Surestart, and in this area alone the CAB helped Broadfield clients make financial gains of £33,261 by making sure people got benefits, tax credits, compensation and grants due to them.

Helping with debt is not the only thing the CAB do: its just the easiest area to quantify the benefits in financial terms. There are also enquiries about relationship issues, discrimination, housing and legal matters.

Crawley CAB spent about £300,000 in the year on all activities, and nearly £800,000 of tangible benefits to Crawley residents can be easily identified, to which can be added the many other less tangible benefits so it looks like a bargain all round.

Crawley Borough Council’s Chief Executive, Michael Coughlin addressed the AGM and I briefly discussed the report with him afterwards. He was as impressed by it as I am, and I would not be surprised to see some of the contents used to support some of the borough council’s social policies in the future.

It is always difficult to manage social policies. You cannot always tell if they are successful and it can be hard to defend spending on social matters when no returns can be identified. The council commissioned a report from the University of Sussex several years ago which has been a great help in this area, but this CAB report could contain an interesting extra plank to support the sort of expenditure which is open to accusations of left-wing do-goodery. If CBC is getting at least £770,000 of relief to its population from only £116,000 of grant aid, it could be considered to be money well spent.