BENEFIT cuts are leaving Poole residents with the choice of going cold or hungry.

With nearly 5,000 people helped by the town’s Citizens Advice Bureau in the past year, the 2012/13 annual report points up a significant increase in enquiries about changes to welfare benefits.

“Already we are seeing clients who are going cold or hungry because the level of benefit income they have is not sufficient to meet normal everyday costs,” said manager Richard Bristow.

“Clients are seeking our help with budgeting but our advisers are seeing spending on basic utilities, housing benefit shortfalls and food only and clients are still in a deficit situation.

“With energy bills increasing, the consequence of insufficient income is that our clients are faced with a decision of being cold in the winter or being hungry. In many cases we see both,” he said.

Debt problems were the second highest number of enquiries and in order to help the most vulnerable, he said they had to refer people capable of using them to external free debt services.

Struggling to make ends meet placed a great strain on relationships and advisers saw daily examples of family breakdowns, divorce and inevitable disputes over housing and children, he said.

This led to increased demand for their services and they had made two major changes to the way they worked.

Firstly, a gateway interview quickly identified the most appropriate way to help someone and a new Dorset Adviceline service created a virtual call-centre with up to 12 advisers staffing phones.

These changes enabled the CAB to deal with an additional 700 people, a 15 per cent increase on the previous year.

More than 9,500 new problems were dealt with, 350 hours a week of voluntary time was given by 50 volunteers and £1,843,000 was gained or written off for clients.