Life in lockdown
Last month at Citizens Advice we published a report analysing our data trends from the last year. From March 1 2020 to Feb 28 2021, we helped over 2 million people with our 1 to 1 advice, despite closing our face to face service for pretty much that whole year. We also had a record 62.8m views of our online advice content. Putting that all together, it was our busiest year ever.
When we use our data to talk about the service, the first thing to do is talk about how many people came to us for advice. We then break that down by, say, the demography of the clients, or the types of problem they came with. This year, we’ve been doing regular sessions where the team talk about these trends. But doing this has also given us a better understanding of how people have been living in this year of lockdown.
For instance, here’s a graph that tells an interesting story. It’s got three lines. The orange line shows the number of pageviews on our site in the year before the pandemic started — March 2019 to February 2020. The dark blue line is a like-for-like comparison, or as close as we can make it — visits to our pages this year, excluding our new coronavirus content. The light blue line is all pageviews in this most recent year. We’ve also shaded in the areas where the lockdowns started and ended. Lockdowns varied locally and there were differences between England and Wales, but we don’t go into that detail here.
At the start of lockdown last year, there were huge spikes in both our coronavirus and non-coronavirus pages. Last March had our busiest day, week and month ever on the website. As lockdown continues, though, the views to the website fell. For the period over April and May, like for like page views were lower than the year before. Total views were up, but only due to our new coronavirus specific content.
As we moved out of the first lockdown in June the blue line overtook the orange, meaning like for like views were up compared to the year before. Add in the extra coronavirus content, and views were regularly 20% or more higher than the previous year. But if we skip forward to the recent lockdown, we see that like-for-like pageviews were down compared to the year before. Total views were higher, but only due to our new coronavirus content.
We see similar patterns on our telephone lines, too, with year on year demand lower in lockdowns but higher otherwise.
Why was this happening? There is a clue in the November lockdown. During that shorter period, people were encouraged to stay at home, but crucially schools remained open. So what we see in our website data is that, yes, there was a fall in views to the site, but the like for like comparison was still higher than the year before.
What this tells us is that homeschooling itself stopped people from coming to us for advice, whether on the phone or on the website. To seek advice you need time and space to think. Having the kids at home 24/7 means that doesn’t happen.
And we know this anyway. In the graph above, all the lines fall sharply at Christmas, as they do every year. Demand also falls at Easter and in the summer holidays in ‘normal’ times. The real difference is that the lockdowns led to problems being stored up. Look at how sharply the dark blue line rises when the spring lockdown ends.
Our report covers the period up to the end of February and so does the graph. But schools went back in early March — did we see an immediate spike in web visits then? Not quite. Monday 7th March, when schools in England returned, was our lowest Monday of the year on the website. Tuesday 8th was our lowest Tuesday. But then our non coronavirus pages had the busiest Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of the year so far, and pageviews were back above the levels of a year earlier.
So what had happened? Parents across the country had taken a couple of days to themselves, with the children back at school, to engage with other aspects of their lives. And after that, it was time to deal with the problems they had been forced to put off since lockdown began.
