New figures show Citizens Advice Bureaux in England and Wales currently dealing with 9,500 new debt problems and 8,200 new benefit problems every working day.

Debt and benefit issues combined now account for over 60% of the CAB workload. Fuelled by the impact of the recession, enquiries in these areas are currently growing at an annual rate of 24%, with CAB advisers handling 2.27 million debt problems and almost 2 million benefits problems in 2009.

Quarterly figures (for 1 October – 31 December 2009) show that the total problem count for the three months October – December 2009 reached 1.7 million, up 20% on the same period the previous year.

Debt problems shot up 24% and enquiries about welfare benefits leapt by 22% compared with the same quarter the year before. This comes on top of earlier sharp increases seen since the start of the recession in April 2008.

Enquiries over rent arrears to private landlords were up 25%.

Citizens Advice chief executive David Harker said: “These figures give a stark insight into the human cost of the recession