What is advice?
Advice is central to what our members do to support their communities.
What do we mean by ‘advice’?
People use the word ‘advice’ in ways that can mean different things.
Often, ‘advice’ is used in an everyday sense to mean telling someone what you think they should do. However, when we talk about ‘advice’ at the Advice Services Alliance, we have a very specific meaning for the word.
For us, ‘advice’ is the activity of helping people to understand their legal rights, to use those rights to challenge decisions when things go wrong, and to obtain their legal entitlements (e.g. benefits).
These rights and entitlements are protected by the law and are an essential part of social justice. It is all very well having rights in theory, but people need to know how to use them in their everyday lives.
Good advice is always specific to the client, the nature of their problem, and their circumstances.
Giving advice requires both an understanding of the law and knowledge of a client’s circumstances.
Many advice services do not think of this as ‘legal advice’, but giving advice means telling people about how the law applies to them. Whilst most advice staff and volunteers are not professional lawyers, they are trained in relevant areas of the law so that they are able to provide a good quality service, and can refer clients on to expert legal help for more complex cases.
What is an advice service?
Free advice services are offered by many types of voluntary, not-for-profit organisations. Here are some examples:
- large legal charities
- high street advice and Law Centres
- telephone helplines
- small community-based charities
- self-help groups
- faith-based organisations.
Some services are well funded and have many advisers. Others are small and run by dedicated individuals with limited resources.
The advice service may be the only service on offer (for example, Citizens Advice), or it may be one of many services available (for example, Age UK).
In all cases, there is no charge to the client for the advice, and every service is passionate about helping people resolve their problems.
Advice Quality Standard
The AQS is the only sector-owned, independently-assessed standard focussing on advice giving.
Find out about what is involved and search for advice services which have been given the award.