'Big Society is a great idea, but it doesn't come for free,' says Citizen Advice Bureau manager Pi Townsend. The funding squeeze could mean a stark choice, she tells me, between paying utility bills at the CAB's three premises in Tunbridge Wells, or paring services to the bone at a time when so many people desperately need them.

Townsend says: ‘We offer great value for money because of our enormous volunteer base – 140 volunteers to just five full-time salaried staff who run the core service across three bureaux. But like all other CABx, we are seeing increasing numbers of clients with complex and far-reaching issues – and our core funding is soon to be cut.’

There is some good news, or perhaps it’s just gallows humour. ‘Our legal aid contract only just breaks even,’ Townsend says, ‘and so losing it won’t make much of a difference to our finances.’

(I ask myself: If an organisation largely staffed by volunteers can’t make legal aid pay, then how on earth can law firms survive?)

CAB’s head office in London reports that last year CAB dealt with 40,000 welfare benefits matters, 60,000 debt matters, 9,000 housing matters and 3,000 employment matters.

Only a handful of those 112,000 matters are to be eligible for legal aid in the future. All welfare benefits law is being removed from the scope of the legal aid scheme. All debt legal aid and housing legal aid is also being removed, except where there is a risk of homelessness. And all employment advice is losing legal aid, too, except where there is discrimination, which is to be treated as a separate category.

These scope changes are likely to have a ‘devastating impact’, the CAB head office report says, and ‘will withdraw much of the specialist advice provided by law centres and CABx’.

Let’s take a closer look at the ‘specialist advice’ given by CAB staff. Hilary Palmer, a qualified solicitor who is one of 11 paid part-time staff working on separately funded projects, tells me about her daily round.

‘Most of my clients are responsible people who find themselves, through no fault of their own, in a crisis,’ she says. ‘They have been in work until now, but have lost their job and suddenly the credit card payments have become a problem and the banks are chasing.

‘Others hadn’t been in their last job for very long – we all used to have the confidence to change jobs every so often – and now find themselves with just a few weeks’ redundancy pay. There’s the mortgage, the kids to feed, the washing machine is broken and suddenly you’re in big trouble.’

And so the list goes on: the self-employed person who was doing very nicely, thank you, until business dropped off the cliff; the person on disability living allowance who is ‘stressed out of her skull’ because of media reports that the government is to force people like her back to work; the middle-class couple who ask how they are going to pay for their ‘place in France’; and the suicidal guy whose business has failed.

Palmer says: ‘I’ve seen a 50% increase since February 2010 in the number of my clients admitted to mental hospital.’

The last words belong to Townsend. ‘This is the worst time to cut back on our services, but there may be no alternative if we cannot find the funds to cover utility bills and rent.’

Long live the Big Society.