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Citizens Advice (CAB) in Auckland are 100 percent funded by Auckland Council. Ōrewa’s CAB comes under the North Shore umbrella. CAB North Shore chair, Rob Mackenzie, says that funding, of just $2m annually, makes the service at 30 CABs possible because it relies almost totally on trained volunteers. In a single year, the Ōrewa branch had 3124 clients, 1957 with a complex problem to solve. CAB has a vast amount of information at its fingertips and Mackenzie says without the service, helping all those people would fall to Council staff. “Council is getting a cheap service,” he says. Mackenzie says the funding cut would not necessarily mean immediate closure. “We could keep going in the short term, with some shrinkage,” he says. “We would have to look for other funding, but it would be extraordinarily difficult to find.” Currently the Ōrewa CAB team is working from home as the building it leases from Council had a major leak in the roof. “We have been on at Council for ages to get the roof fixed but nothing happened and the recent storm made the building uninhabitable,” Mackenzie says.
