One in ten people in Colchester contacted the town’s Citizens Advice Bureau for help last year.

The advice charity dealt with 16,000 inquiries in 2007-08 and, with the credit crunch biting, chief executive Richard Aldridge said there was “no sign of it getting any quieter for us”.

“We are an expanding business, but would rather not be,” he said. “We can never meet demand for our services as it is and we’re currently getting 1,200 phone calls a week.

“We are trying new techniques to deal with phone inquiries to increase access to our services.”

Mr Aldridge said that as the economy heads into recession, two-thirds of the CAB’s casework related to “personal income and people not having enough”.

“Demand for our help to maximise people’s incomes is certainly high,” he said.

“When I joined the bureau in 2004 roughly 19 per cent of our casework was debt-related, and in the last financial year it was up to 41 per cent, while a quarter of our work has consistently been about benefit entitlement.

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