Exeter City Council has reversed its decision to stop providing funding support to Citizens Advice Exeter and is instead to grant it £75,000 a year for two years.
The city council previously supported the charity with £200,000 each year from 2019 to 2023 before halving its annual contribution to £100,000 in 2023-24.
It then agreed to give the charity a one-off grant of £75,000 in January 2024 after initially backing away from withdrawing its support, then stopped funding Citizens Advice Exeter altogether last year.
In September 2024 Citizens Advice Exeter warned that it was at risk of closure and said it expected to have to reduce the number of people it could help by a third the following month.
The council then summoned charity representatives to a scrutiny committee meeting held in November 2024 to discuss the charity’s relationship with the council, as well as its future, but confronted it with a barrage of belligerent questions generated by council director Jo Yelland.
Council funding support for Citizens Advice Exeter ended altogether in April last year.
However, in an unexplained reversal at an executive committee meeting on Monday, the council decided to grant Citizens Advice Exeter £150,000 in two tranches, half this financial year and half next year.
Each year’s grant of £75,000 will cover just under 15% of the charity’s operating costs, whereas the previous annual council grant of £200,000 covered a third of its costs.
Citizens Advice Exeter’s 2025-26 report found that it dealt with close to 18,000 issues last year – including debt, housing and employment – but the number of people it helped fell by 17% from the previous year from 4,300 to 3,600.
The charity said that demand for its services had remained “high and consistent” but the loss of city council funding, as well as having cut its opening hours from five days per week to three, had led to the fall in the number of people it had been able to support.
