A RUSSIAN proverb runs like this: ‘A good friend’s advice hurts, a bad friend’s never’. Now you might be excused for thinking this column refers too often to proverbs. If so, I make no apologies. To me, proverbs are the condensed wisdom of ordinary people, the neglected folk all too often written out of history. In short, the kind of people who sometimes find their lives hit by an unexpected crisis and suddenly need solid, trusted advice to make it through.

Let’s face it, everyday experience tells us advice can be a powerful force for both good and bad. Who among us hasn’t followed dodgy suggestions from friends and regretted it deeply? Or for that matter, heeded wise words that made our lives take a better turn?

Good advice is a treasure often hard to quantify in its reach and effect, a true gift that never stops giving. Which is why it is so unfortunate that Citizens Advice York (CAY) has seen its funding cut to such an extent that it has been forced to reduce its service from four days a week to just two.

It wasn’t the city council that was responsible for the latest funding cuts. But when Labour councillors asked the authority to provide some extra funding to enable CAY to restore its four day service, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats said no.

The estimated price tag for restoring those extra two days of beneficial advice? A pitiful £20,000 required for management and supervision of volunteers, plus reviewing case notes.

As usual, things are not quite as simple as they seem. One Liberal Democrat councillor said his party shared Labour’s concerns, but thought extra support should be available for other advice organisations, not just Citizens Advice.

But this is £20,000 we’re talking about. Is it just me who wonders how we can have reached such a situation? After all, let’s look at what the Citizens Advice does for local people and has done for decades. Here is a charity overwhelmingly run by caring individuals from the community who volunteer to skill up about complex benefit or legal issues and then advise their fellow citizens.

Nationally, Citizens Advice has worked out they actually save the taxpayer money. Informed, impartial advice empowers people. It helps them avoid accessing expensive public services like health service demand, local authority homelessness services and benefits for people not working. Because of this, they calculate the gain to us all is £1.52 for every £1 invested in CA.

Then there is the benefit to individuals. Each pound invested generates £10.97 for individuals through accessing benefits they are legally entitled to, writing off debts and settling consumer problems.

Sound, independent benefits advice will be particularly important with the national roll out of the Government’s new Universal Credit, a profound transition for our welfare system. Around two-fifths of the payments go to people in work, as it includes recipients of tax credits and housing benefit, as well as jobseeker’s allowance and disability benefits. Yet earlier this year, former welfare minister Lord Freud admitted to MPs problems with administering the new benefit were putting about one in four low-income tenants at risk of eviction through rent arrears.

Of course, numbers can’t measure the sense of relief and peace that people troubled by financial and housing worries experience when they are offered a way forward. Treasure indeed.

That is why City of York Council needs to re-think this decision. Of course, we all understand the context the council finds itself in. The Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors running our city face a tense situation implementing the Government’s austerity policies. And I have no doubt those same councillors did not go into politics to make ordinary people’s lives more difficult.

But who now can genuinely and sincerely believe austerity policies in York and nationally are a price worth paying? The standard justification is that we somehow need to ‘balance the books’ through dismantling public services that took generations of investment, imagination and hard work to create. Meanwhile the economy totters and the national debt has reached an astonishing £1.7 trillion. Austerity is not working.

I would urge our local decision-makers to change their minds. £20,000 is a truly small sum when set against the potential good provided by Citizens Advice York. It is less than many people spend on their car. Let’s always remember someone could walk through the doors of York CA tomorrow and find their lives transformed for the better. In difficult, insecure times like these that someone could be any one of us.