Visit a Citizens Advice and see: the ‘cost of living’ doesn’t capture this emergency | Polly Toynbee

In Norwich I meet people who earn less than they need to survive, and staff who have never seen anything like this

The queue forms early outside Norwich’s Citizens Advice. Right next door another other long line waits for the library to open. Queueing for books? Maybe, but mainly for a warm place to spend the day, a member of Citizens Advice staff tells me. They aren’t street homeless but neatly dressed people from cold homes.

This branch of Citizens Advice is only open for two hours on weekday mornings, as it can’t cope with any more clients for its volunteers to triage. Appointments are fully booked for the next two weeks and sometimes desperation explodes. On this day, the advice coordinator, Trudie Gibbons, has to ask a man to leave. He had been yelling, “You’re not giving me any advice!” but she talks him down with what she calls “zero tolerance but great understanding” from her 20 years’ experience. One man arrived with a sharpened stake the other day.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

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