About us
Citizens Advice Greater Essex is the consortium body for the service as a whole, supporting our shared interests ensuring our activities are coordinated to achieve maximum impact, both in terms of direct services to communities but also our aim to advocate for change and achieve influence where we see the need to do so.
Citizens Advice Greater Essex is the consortium body for the nine local Citizens Advice charities serving Essex, Southend and Thurrock. Each of our members is a local charity in its own right — firmly rooted in its community and run by people who know it well — and together we make sure that high-quality, independent advice is available to everyone across the county.
We bring our members together to coordinate shared work, attract funding and investment that no single office could secure alone, and speak up on the issues affecting the people of Greater Essex. The result is more advice, delivered more effectively, for more people.
Our member charities
Citizens Advice Braintree and South Essex
Citizens Advice Chelmsford
Citizens Advice Colchester
Citizens Advice Epping Forest
Citizens Advice Harlow
Citizens Advice Maldon
Citizens Advice Southend
Citizens Advice Tendring
Citizens Advice Uttlesford
A message from the Consortium Director
Martin Lord, Consortium Director of Citizens Advice Greater Essex, reflects on a year of growth.
The pressures on households across Essex, Southend and Thurrock — the cost of living, debt, bills that can't be paid, benefits decisions that don't add up — have been impossible to ignore this year. These are not abstract statistics. They are the realities our advisers meet every day, and they take a real toll on people's health and wellbeing.
Working as team of peers the Chief Officers of our nine local Citizens Advice offices and their teams have helped even more people in 2025/26 than in any previous year — around 85,000 in total. That reflects both the strength of our work across Greater Essex and our increasing presence delivering regional and national services. In turn, that growth is creating new jobs, new expertise and greater resilience right across the network.
None of it would be possible without our volunteers, our staff and the nine local charities that make up our consortium. We achieve far more together than any of us could alone and that, in the end, is the point.
If you are interested in our work, and want to explore working together, get in touch.
Martin Lord
Consortium Director, Citizens Advice Greater Essex
Read our impact report
This report presents our work, in numbers, to present an accurate and detailed picture of the effect of the work we do in the county. Over 600 volunteers, supported by teams of dedicated paid staff, work for the service to achieve all of this.
Whilst they recognise the difference they make for individuals, such is the pace of their work, it’s sometimes hard to think about the difference they are achieving collectively as a result of being part of something bigger. In no small way then this report is as much for them, as it is do demonstrate to our partners what an extraordinary organisation we are.