Tag Archives: martin lewis

“Phony Freeze” – Ed Davey calls out Government as bills double from last year

Ed Davey has accused the Conservatives of bringing in a “phony freeze” on energy bills, after it emerged the average family will see their heating costs almost double this winter compared to last year.

Here he is challenging the Prime Minister:

Under the plans set out by Liz Truss today, energy costs will be capped at £2,500 a year for the average home, almost double the £1,277 the cap was set at last October. It is also an increase of over £500 on the current price cap.

Liberal Democrats were the first to call for energy bills to be properly frozen by keeping the current cap in place, funded by a tougher windfall tax on the record profits of oil and gas companies.

Ed said:

This phony freeze will still leave struggling families and pensioners facing impossible choices this winter as energy bills almost double.

Liz Truss and the Conservatives are choosing to allow this huge hike to people’s heating costs, while refusing to properly tax the eye-watering profits of oil and gas companies.

This is a deliberate choice and it is the wrong one. People are furious that once again the Conservatives are on the side of oil and gas giants making record profits rather than families struggling to make ends meet.

The point about a cap being funded at least in part by a windfall tax is an important one. Why should huge energy companies get an unexpected £170 billion bonanza and not have to contribute at all, yet a household on the average wage gets a huge hike in their bills this Winter?

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Isolation diary: Dealing with the fallout

Our late flowering cherry tree is starting to bloom (photo taken this morning)

In today’s Observer, Martin Lewis (of moneysavingexpert.com) is quoted as saying:

When you watch the news, they’re interested in telling you what’s happening. I’m interested in telling you what you should do. So when someone’s desperate, and it’s someone for whom I don’t have an answer, that’s when I get really upset. That’s when I sit at my desk and I have a little cry. I find it really frustrating. I know I’m meant to be the person who can answer questions – but sometimes there isn’t an answer. And someone’s pleading with me to help them.

Lewis is carrying a heavy burden on behalf of those struggling financially during the crisis. He says there are “devastating holes” in the system and that he has cried 15 or 16 times in the last few weeks over them. Exploiting his reputation as the “most trusted person in Britain”, he has already launched some successful challenges to the Government, identifying the unintended consequences and “omissions which are not deliberate” of some of the schemes pushed through to deal with the fallout from coronavirus.

And he has put his money where his mouth is, by donating £1.9 million to a fund he has set up to support charities that are providing poverty relief. The fund enables those front line charities to carry on working through the crisis.

Reading that article reminded me that MPs and caseworkers are also fighting battles on behalf of their constituents, especially for those who are in serious difficulties but can’t access support.

MPs and their staff are themselves working under stressful circumstances, sometimes without access to the paper records and other resources that they need. The landscape has changed dramatically and they are having to familiarise themselves with a whole host of new regulations, and they need to tap into all the local sources of support. Many of them could have echoed that quote from Martin Lewis.

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Money saving expert Martin Lewis on Labour’s fees policy: ‘Poorer students will subsidise city investment bankers’

Here’s part of what Martin Lewis, the Money Saving Expert, said on the BBC’s World at One today:

This is the worse type of politics for me. It is the politics that may appeal to people on the surface but it is financially illiterate…If any other party was launching a policy that effectively meant that poorer students would be subsidising city investment banking graduates, which is what this does, there would be protests in the streets and it would be led by the Labour party. I simply don’t understand how they’ve launched this.

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The good news on university applications in 5 graphs

While the attention of the world’s media was focused on an 8lb 6oz bundle of Royal joy, there was perhaps even more significant good news about young people that didn’t garner quite so much coverage: demand for higher education from young people is at or near record levels for each country of the UK in 2013. This was announced by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) yesterday, an analysis of patterns of demand from over 20 million applications for higher education from 2004 to 2013 — if ever there were a day to bury good news…

Here are five graphs which tell the story…

Demand for higher education from young people is at or near record levels for each country of the UK in 2013.

ucas figures - application figs 2013

Application rates for English 18 year olds have increased by one percentage point to 35 per cent in 2013. This increase is typical of the trend between 2006 and 2011 and takes the application rate back to the 2011 level, after its decrease in 2012. Application rates for 18 year olds in Northern Ireland have increased to 48 per cent, application rates in Scotland (32 per cent) and Wales (30 per cent) are similar to the 2012 cycle.

Application rates for young, disadvantaged groups have increased to new highs in England.

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Three ways to make sure you’re talking sense on student numbers, tuition fees and all that

Want to make sure your comments are grounded in solid evidence when talking about the impact of tuition fees on students numbers and the like in England? Prefer evidence that stands up to a little basic scrutiny over that which falls apart the moment you apply a critical rather than a closed partisan mind to it? Then there are three things to remember.

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A longer watch for the weekend: Martin Lewis on tuition fees

24 minutes and 1 second of the financial advisor and consumer champion Martin Lewis talking about the tuition fees system, how it works and what people get wrong about it:

Posted in News and YouTube | Also tagged and | 78 Comments

Tuition fees: new IFS publication says new system “substantially more progressive”

News from the IFS confirms what others, including Money Saving Expert’s Martin Lewis and of course Nick Clegg, have previously argued:

The government’s decision to raise maximum tuition fees to £9,000 will create a system that is “substantially more progressive” than the previous system. That is because the 30% of graduates with the lowest lifetime earnings will be better off under the new arrangements.

And no cynical comments please about just how far down The Guardian’s story this paragraph was placed 🙂

 

P.S. As it’s the weekend and people may have other things to do, in order to save time I’ve …

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Opinion: The truth about the graduate contribution

There is a real danger that many prospective students will be put off from going to university due to the confusion, half-truths and lies, often left unchallenged, relating to the new system of university funding and graduate contributions.

A bright light which breaks through the fog can be found over at MoneySavingExpert.com, where Martin Lewis pares things back to the bare facts. His Student Loans Guide 2012 makes the following key points:

  • Existing students stay on the old system of loans
  • Students don’t pay anything up front
  • Graduates will pay back £540 per year less than they do under the current system – graduates will have more money in their pocket each month
  • Graduates who earn less than £21,000 don’t pay back anything
  • Graduates will owe more and be in debt longer but this debt will not affect credit ratings
  • People shouldn’t think of the new system as a loan but as a graduate tax
  • The rules may be different for students in Scotland and Wales
  • Most people will never pay back all of this debt as the debt is wiped out after 30 years

A graduate tax: the very thing that the NUS has been calling for. It is a crying shame that the NUS has decided to be political over the new changes rather than do the right thing by the people it professes to represent.

I would be extremely disappointed if there is a single person put off going to university due to the spin put on the changes by the NUS. Let’s hope that as many prospective students as possible find their way to MoneySavingExpert.com where they can actually get some honest expert advice on what to expect when they take up their courses in 2012.

Editor’s note: You can also watch a video of Martin Lewis explaining student funding from 2012 on YouTube:

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Daily View 2×2: 29 October 2009

Good morning and welcome to October 29th. Today is the anniversary of the first performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the birthday of Boswell, the biographer of Samuel L Jackson, and the anniversary of the death of Sir Walter Raleigh (he was executed – I didn’t know that.)

It’s also the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which first set up a Constitution for Europe.

2 Big Stories

The postal strike is on
Read all about it on the Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian:

Both sides blamed each other after three days of talks mediated by the TUC collapsed without a deal being reached. As late as evening there had still been some hope that this week’s strike action could be called off to relieve the pressure on Royal Mail.

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Clegg impresses MoneySavingExpert.com

MoneySavingExpert is reporting that Nick Clegg answered an open letter to David Cameron before the Tories managed to get their boots on:

It came about in an unusual way. Clegg (pictured, right) is one of the 3.5 million recipients of the MoneySavingExpert.com (MSE) weekly money tips email. In it, three weeks ago, he spotted an open letter to David Cameron where MSE asked the Tory leader to back the campaign for automatic refunds.

While Cameron has not replied, Clegg, and his Shadow Chancellor Vince Cable, in a letter to MSE this week (see full text below), have promised to table a

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