12 months of the pandemic. Millions more turned to our website for online self-help advice. Our advice pages were viewed over 60 million times, almost 10 million more than in the previous year. Our teams worked tirelessly to update our online self-help advice as the crisis escalated, new rules came into force and we all tried to come to terms with ‘lockdown’, ‘furlough’ and ‘self-isolation’. Like many organisations, when the pandemic hit we saw a huge increase in demand and a surge in traffic to our website. As a national service operating across England and Wales, this gave us a unique insight into a unique situation. The real-time nature of our data—tracking the problems people come to us for support with, either one-to-one or via our website—enabled us to identify the problems people were facing as those problems arose. That’s why, as well as using this insight to make decisions about our own service, we’ll continue to share it openly with the government and the public. In this challenging year, it was more important than ever to be a strong, clear voice speaking up for those who come to us for help—using our data and insight to tackle the problems they face. Our influencing campaigns helped achieve positive change for people, from securing an extension on the eviction ban enforced for people in the private rented sector in both England and Wales during the first lockdown, to securing a 6-month extension to the £20 a week uplift to Universal Credit. We also continued work on our long-term priorities, for example, pushing regulators to save customers subject to the loyalty penalty billions in the coming years. For our volunteers and staff, we’ve used the ways of working adopted during the pandemic as an opportunity to change how we work in the future, moving to a blended approach of remote and office working. This approach has the potential to provide a better volunteer and employee experience, improve wellbeing, and make work more inclusive and accessible, using the effective digital collaboration tools we’ve established. We’ve also pushed forward new, innovative partnerships with other organisations. In partnership with the Trussell Trust, our Our advice pages were viewed over 60 million times, almost 10 million more than in the previous year. 5 Introduction