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Government funding for Citizens Advice fell by more than £10m last year, even though requests for help in response to Covid-19 and the economic crisis grew.
The charity’s total income in the 12 months to the end of March 2022 was £153.6m, down from £162.6m the year before, according to annual accounts published overnight.
This included an 11 per cent fall in the value of government grants made by Whitehall and the devolved administration in Wales, from £111.6m to £99.2m.
A one-off government grant for responding to the impact of the pandemic ended in 2020/21.
The accounts say that Citizens Advice “continued to see demand for our services rise” and handled one million more phone calls from the public compared to the year before.
Individual cases were “more complex and urgent” and took more resources to resolve than previously, the report says.
It adds: “However, our capacity to meet this demand was limited by available funding and recruitment and retention challenges.”
The charity is working to secure more multi-year funding in an attempt to make its finances more stable, the accounts say.
Citizens Advice spent £151.1m in 2021/22, down from £158m in the previous 12 months, and reported a surplus of £9.7m.
Its free reserves stand at nearly £19m, comfortably within the range set by the charity’s trustees.
The charity spent £38.2m on staff salaries last year, £1m less than the year before, including £900,000 on redundancy and settlement payments to employees leaving the organisation.
Writing in the introduction to the accounts, Clare Moriarty, chief executive of Citizens Advice, said the charity’s staff “can feel like they are running out of tools” to help people in need.
“We are trying to meet this huge need for our services with funding that, at both national and local level, is flat or reducing in the face of increasing inflationary pressures,” Moriarty said, although she added that she remained optimistic about the role of Citizens Advice in the future.