Multi-Year Funding
by David Hilferty, CAS Director of Impact.
This article was first published in The Herald on 21 February 2026.
Last week, the Citizens Advice network received the welcome news from the Scottish Government that one of our key programmes of work is moving to a multi-year funding cycle.
To describe that as a gamechanger is an understatement.
At its heart, advice is about bringing stability to volatility. Multi-year funding helps lift parts of the immense pressure on our network and enables them to do what they do best – deliver advice that change lives.
As one CAB manager put to us, “our community really needs this advice, we are so relieved they will still have access to this.”
And while it was news we would welcome at any time, it was the boost we all needed last week after a video appeared on social media, showing the waiting area of one of our CABs. It was packed full of people waiting in line for support – nothing unusual in that.
But the intention of that person was to incite a racist, anti-welfare social media pile-on based around misinformation and mythmaking.
Now 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. That unmistakable sense that after months or even years of trying to address something, at last, someone’s got your back. Because there’s not many feelings like that, is there?
So for someone to undermine that confidential safe space is appalling.
And while it is a single video, this is not an isolated moment.
Because in the last year, the rhetoric surrounding social security has become divisive and demonising, with claims of over-spend and over-diagnosis.
When all of the evidence – and our network sees this first-hand in communities all across Scotland – points towards deepening poverty and hardship.
As rhetoric begins to slide backwards, it’s a reminder that ground won already, is not guaranteed to remain won. What is won today, can be lost tomorrow.
The status quo – or the notion of constant linear progress – is not a given.
And we are increasingly seeing attempts to erode the ground that we have on social justice.
I had this thought during the response to the two-child limit. Like so many organisations across this sector we advocated and campaigned hard on that.
Yet what the scrapping of the two child-limit effectively amounted to was stopping doing something that was actively harmful.
That is in no way to downplay how much this was the right thing to do. The overdue thing to do.
Whether to keep or scrap the two-child limit was a political choice, and with the Scottish Parliament election fast approaching we will no doubt be hearing much more about the choices facing the people seeking power.
And we need more good choices like removing the two-child limit – and like the decision taken by the Scottish Government this past week to support essential frontline services like ours.
Social security is an investment in all of us.
Multi-year backing is a key enabler to ensuring that Scotland’s anti-poverty infrastructure is strong and sustainable enough to underpin its delivery.
Because now more than ever, we need to hold our ground.