The Government-funded Money Advice Service (MAS) came under renewed scrutiny this week as it admitted generating less than 284,000 financial action plans for website visitors in six months, against a full year target of one million.
MAS said it now had 30,000 "customers" a week, a rise of 8% on the previous year.
But independent financial advisers, who have been critical of MAS's promise of "advice" for what is general guidance, questioned how many of the 703,000 website visitors were actually being helped.
MAS said it engaged with 72,000 people directly, 26,000 by phone or webchat and 46,000 face to face through partners such as Citizens Advice. When MAS launched in Scotland in June 2011, it said its UK-wide target was to help 100,000 people face to face.
Gillian Guy, chief executive of Citizens Advice, told Treasury committee MPs recently the MAS marketing budget of £19 million, out of a total £46m, was "colossal", when Citizens Advice was able to spend only £20m a year in total on debt advice. MAS's spend, she said, appeared to be "to no great effect".
One IFA blogged: "Only 72,000 actually asked for help, so that's £6388 each, sounds pretty expensive."
The organisation's chief executive Tony Hobman was forced to quit in July after MPs lambasted the organisation and particularly his £350,000 salary.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article