People Prefer Face-to-Face
by Derek Mitchell, CAS Chief Executive.
This article was first published in The Herald on 14 February 2026.
Recent polling by YouGov on how Scottish people feel about advice provision contained one finding that jumped out at me. When asked how important it is that advice can be provided in-person or face-to-face, 90% said it was important, with 59% saying very important.
In a world where so many inter-actions are moving online, this figure tells an important story. It’s why the face-to-face model will always be the cornerstone of our service in Citizens Advice Scotland.
There are of course other ways people can access our support. Many prefer the convenience of email, phone or web-based advice – all of which we also provide. Indeed, during 2024/25 our advice website had more than 4.3 million views.
But wondrous though technology is, it’s no good for those who are digitally excluded, while others simply prefer the face-to-face experience. That’s why so many people still come through the doors of one of our 300 service points in Scotland and talk to an adviser in person.
When someone does come to their local CAB, they seldom come with just one problem. What starts as a single question about a housing issue or how to deal with a bill rapidly morphs into a spider’s web of other worries, maybe including social security entitlement, employment, family, debt or legal concerns.
Our advisers’ skills lie not just in having the knowledge of how to solve problems but in listening, gaining the person’s trust and building their confidence. This enables the adviser to take a holistic approach, to tease out more information and offer help on all the inter-woven aspects of the person’s situation.
It’s true that all this can be done over the phone or internet too, but it doesn’t surprise me that so many prefer the face-to-face option. It also tends to make communication easier for those who don’t speak English well. And let’s face it, it’s harder to offer a cup of tea online too!
I’ve often said that when you walk into a CAB there’s a magic to it. That mixture of intense urgency, but also a calm assurance – the unmistakable sense that after months or even years of trying to cope with a problem, at last, someone’s got your back. There aren’t many times you get to feel that, are there? Local advice, underpinned by local knowledge. That’s what people want, and this latest polling proves it.
Of course advice like this has to be paid for. Not by the person being helped – we’re very proud that in 87 years, we’ve never charged anyone a penny for our advice, and we never will. But it has to be funded somehow.
Like most charities, CABs are dependent on short-term funding arrangements (usually just across single years) which make it difficult to plan ahead and even to retain staff. Indeed stop-and-start contracts mean that all too often our staff are advising people on unemployment while they themselves don’t know if their own job is safe.
I therefore look to government – including those standing for election as MSPs in May – to continue supporting in-person advice. That means ensuring frontline services like ours can keep changing lives over the next Parliament and well beyond that.