Gill Pipkin

Citizens Advice Cornwall chief executive Gill Pipkin is very much a people person.

Having started her career in the tourism industry, spending eight years as joint MD at the Fieldhead Hotel in Looe, before working as PA to the Armstrongs at The Headland, her career path took her to the Royal Cornwall Hospital Trust, where she spent several years in such roles as running the office of the medical director and The Knowledge Spa.

As part of our focus on health and wellbeing in the workplace, Gill explains the importance of looking after your staff and her wider role in helping people in Cornwall move ahead.

Going from hotels, NHS and to what you do now seems quite a diverse career path. Was it as different as it sounds?

It’s all about people, isn’t it? And it’s the subject of ‘people’ which has always interested me; how to make work better for people, to make the difference and to make an impact. And I think that’s what led me to Citizens Advice, I had been involved in voluntary work in some way or another. And moving into Citizens Advice was really at the front line of being able to make things better for people who were struggling.

And before you joined Citizens Advice, you had your own consultancy which was based around the growing importance of corporate social responsibility.

Yes and change management; trying to get businesses to take up corporate social responsibility as a means of improving their business and making their business more meaningful for their team and their customers. It’s certainly something that organisations are looking to get into, and the employees of the future, the generation coming through now are actively saying they want to know that the organisation they work for has a purpose that is good for the planet. So, I think CSR is a really important concept.

Are businesses more conscious of the importance of staff wellbeing?

There has been a big rise in information about mental health and wellbeing. I think physical health has always been one issue and there’s been a statutory responsibility for organisations to look after staff who become physically unwell. But until very recent times, it’s been hard to know how to manage people who are struggling with mental ill health. And we’ve seen in the past few years a rise in things like mental health first aid, support in the workplace for people who are struggling, and a complete shift in the way you support people who are off because of depression or anxiety.

In the past, there was a great degree of ignorance surrounding mental health, thinking that you could just snap out of it. And people masked a lot of their anxiety, depression, mental ill health in general, because they were afraid of the impact it would have on their job. We still get people who are afraid to admit that they’re struggling, because they think that people are going to think differently of them, judge them because of their ill health.

How do we identify these sorts of issues?

It’s about opening up communication, making it safe to talk about how they’re feeling, any anxiety, stress problems outside of the workplace that might impact on their work. Providing in house mental health support through things like Mental Health First Aiders, ensuring that people aren’t constantly overworked, making sure there is a work life balance. Every business has its peaks and troughs; when you’re really busy you need all hands on deck, completely understand that, but when it goes a little bit quieter, encourage staff to take time off, maybe even closing the office and taking them out for a day in nature. Those sorts of things really reap rewards, not just in staff retention and productivity, but it helps people feel valued and respected. They end up giving far more as a result.

Does the size of the company have a bearing on this?

You may think these sort of initiatives are easier for bigger companies, but actually it’s easier for smaller companies just to say, let’s lock the office up for the afternoon and go and play football or have an afternoon on the beach, rather than coordinating 1,000 people to go off and do something together. But it’s something that every organisation should be considering.

Did the pandemic accelerate this as an issue?

I think it became harder to manage because people were working remotely. You would see them on a Teams or a Zoom meeting, but you wouldn’t necessarily know what was happening in the background. Working remotely suited some people down to the ground, but for others it didn’t work at all and really put extra pressure and stress on them. So, it was very difficult for employers to manage people’s mental health and wellbeing because you can’t check in on them. Employers need to be flexible, but for those ones who are working from home, there needs to be some way of catching up with them face to face, because they don’t always reveal everything that’s going on with a virtual meeting.

Everyone has their own idea as to what Citizens Advice does and why it’s there, but what is the true answer?

We have two main objectives. One is to help people with the problems they face. And for that we provide a confidential, non-judgmental professional, impartial advice, and also to identify and campaign on the issues that are impacting people.

The majority of our service is frontline advice delivery on anything from “I’ve got a parking ticket” through to “my wife just left me” and “I’ve lost my job”. So right across the spectrum. And very rarely do people come in with one issue, they will come in because they’ve lost their job, but they lost their job because their relationship broke down. And our job is to identify all the key issues that are impacting them and to try and put in place a plan to help them out. It might be claiming more benefits, it might be getting them into accommodation, it might be supporting them through a divorce and access to children, all that sort of thing.

We collect huge amounts of data on the issues that are impacting people and geographically where they’re impacting them. Every two weeks we produce a heat map of Cornwall of where people are coming from, and the issues that they’ve come across, demographic, age, house ownership or tenancy or whatever. So that gives us some really detailed data through which we can identify the issues that are coming through.

For instance, one of the issues was the rising homelessness as we came out of the pandemic, and the hidden homeless, the ‘sofa surfers’ who weren’t necessarily on the streets, but living in somebody’s living room, moving from sofa to sofa. And we can gather the case stories and the data, and then produce that for MPs and lobbying bodies to try and make the case for change.

And stop the problems arising in the first place?

Very much that’s where I see us having to move in the future because there’s no way that we can meet all the demand that is coming to us. But if we can put in place preventative work to stop people getting into crisis in the first place, that’s got to be more effective for everybody.

Do you often refer these people to other charities for specific help, where you might not have the expertise?

We don’t do pastoral support, as such. We very much work with other charities. One fantastic project we’ve got going at the moment is with Pentreath. They provide three mental health workers alongside our debt workers and they work in partnership to have them going out to see an individual and working through the debt and maybe the potential of losing their home. And by removing the worry of money and living circumstances, it allows the mental health workers to focus on the mental health issues.

Do financial issues tend to be at the heart of most problems you deal with?

Yes. I think most people have money worries from time to time. It can impact on relationships, it might impact on work, because you’re worried the bailiffs might be around this evening, that sort of thing. So, a lot of our work is around debt, or around making sure that people are claiming the right benefits and support, because there’s an awful lot of people who aren’t claiming the support that they’re entitled to.

And with the cost-of-living crisis, I assume you’re seeing a big rise in these enquiries?

There has been a 36% increase in cost-ofliving issues in the last year. And that is just going to rise as things like interest rates hit people with mortgages. What we’ve seen in the last three years is a completely different set of people needing to access our services. People who previously had reasonable jobs, hadn’t needed to claim benefits and had been able to resolve their problems themselves. Going into the pandemic, we saw a lot of people on furlough, and all of a sudden the money coming in each month didn’t match the money going out. Now we’re seeing people who are in good jobs, on a reasonable wage, not being excessive with foreign holidays or eating out all the time. But their income doesn’t match the cost-of-living rises.

Generally speaking, do most people who need help, ask for help? Or is there a silent majority, too proud to talk up?

What we see is people don’t tend come to us until they are in absolute crisis. So yes, most people come too late. But what I always say is, if you think you’re going to have a problem, even if you haven’t got one yet, give us a call now. Because we might be able to put in place, even if it’s just learning how to budget, some actions that you can take without having to go through the whole advice process. And it may be just directing you to a website where you can get the help that you need. So, you don’t have to wait for one of our advisors.

Have you always been interested in people? Is that your main motivation, what gets you up in the morning?

I’m fascinated with people; what makes them tick and what makes things better for them. And I am ever the optimist, that we can make a society that’s better for everybody, but without getting political, we are in a very, very unequal society at the moment. And maybe we need to break the whole system in order to build something that’s fairer for everybody.

It must take a specific type of person to want to make a difference like this. It would be a lot easier, wouldn’t it, just to ignore it and get on with your life?

I think it’s something that all of my team fit. We don’t do what we do for the money. If I wanted to make money, I’d go do something else completely! We do it because we get more out of it than we put in. There are people who’ve come to us with nothing. We’ve spent time with them and while we possibly haven’t resolved everything, the difference it’s made in their life and how they feel about themselves afterwards gives you a real uplifting feeling.

With a looming recession and economic pressures, it must be very difficult for charities at the moment to finance their work, how are you coping with that?

Madly writing funding beds, just like every other charity. But what the pandemic has allowed charities in Cornwall to do is to work much more closely together. So, we are collaborating on funding bids that will benefit lots more charities, rather than us being in competition. And we all have different strengths and weaknesses. If we can work to our strengths and let somebody else deal with the bits we’re not very good at, that’s much better.

We have started our community fundraising programme, which is very new for Citizens Advice. It’s not something that has really happened anywhere in the country to any great degree and trying to get our community behind us to help each other by donating. Charities have been hit in many ways. There are thousands of charities, and a lot of them rely on supermarket collections or a fun run or something like that. And over the past two years that has been just decimated. Then you look at the local authorities or the national Government grant funding for projects and that is really being squeezed. And I don’t see any end to that. I think what we as charities have to do is to demonstrate the impact that we make from much smaller resources than a commercial organisation, that we can do it far more efficiently and effectively than a commercial body that’s wanting to make a profit out of it. That’s the message that we need to get across.

Because the need for charities like yours is, I guess, greater than ever?

I think our charity was set up on the eve of World War Two. And I don’t think we’ve ever been in as much demand as we are now.

Some charities did go under during the pandemic and sadly probably more will in the next few months, along with many businesses who have struggled through. For a lot of charities, there has been quite a bit of emergency funding coming through. We’ve had bits of money that have come through almost at the last minute, and you’ve had to spend it by tomorrow type of thing, which has been challenging and frustrating because you actually want to be able to plan how to spend that money better. But it’s all got to be got rid of by the end of March, otherwise you’ve got to pay it back. It’s going to be a challenge for many when that emergency funding runs out.

What are your main goals over the next couple of years?

I think my main goal is to make the organisation sustainable, so that we know we’ve got that long-term funding, that we’ve got a model that works and that can flex to meet demand wherever and whatever that is. So that might be being less office based and more going out into communities. And looking after my workforce and making sure that they are ok.

Because their role is to look after the people out there. But who looks after them?

That’s mine and my senior team’s role, because without them, we can’t look after the people who really need us. So, we’re putting a lot of things in place; we’ve already got Mental Health First Aiders across the organisation, we’ve got one of our in-house trainers who can do mental health awareness training. So, we’re rolling that out next year. We’re also putting in peer mentors, so if you’ve got problem, you don’t necessarily have to go and talk to your line manager, you can talk to somebody else in your team.

Mental health awareness has come a long way in recent years, but how far is there still to go?

We’re still in the foothills of looking after people. Because there’s still an awful lot of people who are afraid to talk about mental health in the workplace, frightened they’re going to say the wrong thing. I think we need to break down that stigma.

For want of a better word, these days we hear more often from celebrities coming out and talking about their mental health issues. Is that a positive thing?

I think it is as long as it doesn’t get rammed down people’s throats. There’s always that balance, that if somebody starts coming out and ramming it down your throat, you just think “actually too much”. It’s exactly the same as if I had a physical problem and I started telling you all the ins and outs.

Is there more pressure on you and your team at the moment than ever before? And can this pressure sometimes become almost too much?

Yes, absolutely, and sometimes you have to go for a long walk, stomp around, have a rant at somebody who understands. I think with every organisation that deals with difficult situations, you have to have a sort of black sense of humour that gets you through. We do very much encourage people to offload whatever’s bothering them, go home and forget about it. But it’s really hard at the moment because bad news is being bombarded 24/7 through the press, which can be so depressing.

It comes back to how we’re bringing our children up. We don’t teach them about mental resilience. We don’t teach them how to manage their money, budgeting that sort of thinking. And I think it’s those life skills that need to be taught right from the word go. We need to give people the skills in the first place. We try to work with people not just to resolve their debt issues, but also to give them these skills so they can cope and manage in the future.

I have a little saying that we are a crutch in a crisis, not the walking stick for life.