Martin Lewis (financial journalist)

Early life and education

Lewis was born at Withington Hospital in Manchester in 1972. His family lived in the Manchester suburb of Didsbury. While still a youngster, Lewis moved with his family to the village of Norley near Delamere Forest in rural Cheshire where his father was appointed headmaster of Delamere Forest School; a Jewish school for students with special educational needs.

Lewis attended the King's School, an independent school in Chester. Lewis went on to read government and law at the London School of Economics. In 1997, Lewis became a postgraduate student in Broadcast Journalism at Cardiff University Centre for Journalism Studies. In 2013, Lewis was given an honorary doctorate in Business Administration from the University of Chester.

Early career

After graduating, Lewis was appointed as the general secretary of the LSE Students' Union.

Lewis then went to work in the City of London for the Brunswick Group, a financial communications consultancy.

Lewis has also tried his hand at stand-up comedy, reaching the final of Young Jewish Stand-up of the Year with a set written by two former University friends, comedian Gary Delaney and football writer Neil Andrews.

TV and radio

After graduating as a journalist, Lewis became a producer for the BBC Business Unit working on the BBC Radio Five Live business programmes and as an editor of BBC Radio 4's Today programme business slot.

Lewis then moved to Sky's programme Simply Money, fronted by Angela Rippon, where he cultivated his Money Saving Expert persona. From the outset, the satellite channel suffered poor viewing figures, and eventually its main backer, Invest TV Resources, decided to pull the plug in March 2001. Almost all of its 51 staff, including Lewis, lost their jobs.

After the collapse of Simply Money, Lewis was asked to write a "Deal of the Week" column in the Sunday Express. Lewis was also granted "MoneySavingExpert" slots on Channel 5's Open House with Gloria Hunniford.

Lewis was invited back to the BBC to work as a business and personal finance reporter for the Corporation's BBC One Breakfast News. Lewis has also been interviewed for BBC Radio 4's Money Box.

In 2005, Lewis was given a daytime television series on ITV called Make Me Rich and in 2008, a peak time programme on Five called It Pays to Watch!. Lewis has also presented money special editions for ITV's Tonight, and has featured as a "Money Saving Expert" on several other magazine programmes including Good Morning Britain and Lorraine.

Lewis currently appears on ITV's This Morning, Channel 5's The Wright Stuff and as a guest on other news and magazine programmes including periodic appearances on the BBC consumer programme Watchdog. In 2012, he began co-presenting his own ITV show The Martin Lewis Money Show, alongside Saira Khan.

Lewis has an ongoing phone-in slot on BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show and BBC Radio 1's Jo Whiley. He is also a regular contributor on Shelagh Fogarty's noonday BBC Radio 5 Live show on Thursdays.

Lewis has also been a guest on The Sarah Millican Television Programme, where Sarah made jokes at his expense while interviewing him.

Money Saving Expert

In October 2002, Martin appeared in the Meridian Trust's (now Public Service Broadcasting Trust) live Spotlight Programme "Save yourself a fortune" on ITV Meridian as their Money Saving Expert for the first time. The programme subsequently won the Royal Television Society Educational Award – 2002 Campaigns and Seasons.

Lewis created and runs the website MoneySavingExpert.com (MSE), which was originally designed for a cost of just £100 in February 2003. The site had grown to attract 13 million monthly users by 2012, with 7 million subscribers opting in to receive weekly emails. In September 2012 he sold the website to the Moneysupermarket.com group for up to £87m, while remaining editor-in-chief. The deal saw Lewis receive £35m cash upfront in addition to 22.1m shares in Moneysupermarket.com and £27m in future payments. He simultaneously announced his intention to gift £10m to charity, of which £1m would go to Citizens Advice.

In July 2015 Lewis sold just over half his shareholding in Moneysupermarket.com, obtained in the sale of Money Saving Expert, for £25.2 million. On the back of this, he donated a further £1m to Citizens Advice and £500,000 each to The Trussell Trust and the Personal Finance Education Group to fund financial triage and education work.

As of 2016, MSE was reportedly ranked the biggest consumer and personal finance site in the UK with about 15 million users each month, and 10 million email addresses receiving the free Martin's Money Tips weekly email.

Newspapers

Lewis has a fortnightly column in The Sunday Post and a monthly regional syndicated column in the Manchester Evening News and the Express & Star amongst others. He has been a columnist for The Sunday Times, News of the World, The Guardian and the Sunday Express. All his columns are on the theme of saving money.

Books

He is the author of two best-selling books, The Money Diet and The Three Most Important Lessons You've Never Been Taught and edited another, Thrifty Ways for Modern Days, which was based on contributions to a forum on his website.

Unauthorised business promotion

In 2010, Martin Lewis was a presenter on GMTV with Lorraine, a lively weekday morning chat show. The programme includes a regular feature called "Deals of the Week". Ofcom investigated a complaint that the programme promoted MoneySavingExpert.com, a website owned and run by Mr Lewis as a commercial enterprise.

Lewis denied any wrongdoing, and continues to do so. However, the Ofcom report concluded: "By inviting viewers to obtain further information and vouchers on the GMTV website, and then re-directing them to Martin Lewis' commercial website to obtain that information, the programme was effectively promoting his business. As a result of this promotion, the programme was in breach of Rule 10.3 of the Code."

Bank charges

In late 2005, campaigns against what were claimed to be unfair bank charges gained momentum and a few small websites started to highlight the issue. Lewis was at the forefront of the media campaign to reclaim what he states are unfair and unlawful fees charged by UK banks. He presented the first mainstream television programme on how to get your money back (ITV1's Tonight) and in November 2006 published a step-by-step guide, including template letters, which speedily achieved its millionth download in February 2007 and by August 2007 had over four million downloads as well as regularly appearing across the media to champion the issue.

His campaign suffered a major setback in November 2009 when the Supreme Court ruled that the charges imposed by banks formed part of their fees for current account services and could not be assessed for fairness under the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations. Lewis, along with and other consumer groups, hired Ray Cox QC (a barrister with previous experience of banking cases) to look into new legal arguments for account holders wishing to reclaim charges, which might possibly use regulation 5 of the Unfair Terms act as suggested by the Supreme Court Judgement. This attempt suffered a further setback when, on 22 December 2009, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) issued a statement saying that it had decided against taking forward such an investigation because it "would have a very limited scope and low prospects of success". Lewis published updated template letters allowing individuals to attempt to recover bank charges on financial hardship grounds on 2 February 2010, and information regarding claims on legal grounds made via courts was published on 24 February 2010. Lewis admitted that in relation to claiming via the courts the "chances of success are impossible to work out" and also "if you’ve had charges and don’t fit the Ombudsman’s criteria, it’s at this point you may need to accept you won’t get your money back or at least wait to see others are successful".

Council tax

In January 2007, he presented a programme Tonight on Council Tax Cashback, a campaign to get everyone in the UK to check and potentially challenge their Council Tax band, that first started on his website and has led, according to his website, to "many" backdated windfall payments resulting from thousands of claims.

Energy bills

In summer 2008, Lewis appeared on several television and radio programmes exhorting consumers to "cap your energy bills now", based on the prediction that there would be a further round of price increases at the end of 2008. "Capping prices" involved consumers locking themselves into rates higher than prevailing un-capped rates. After that point British Gas announced an increase of 30% on its un-capped prices, though in January 2009 UK energy companies' un-capped prices were reduced by up to 10%.

Information published by uSwitch, a price comparison site whose business motivation is to encourage frequent switching between energy suppliers, after the price cuts, in February 2009, suggested that "Those who were savvy enough to sign up to a competitive fixed-price plan last summer, before some increases in wholesale energy were passed on, are sitting pretty as prices would need to drop by 16% on average before it would be worth moving" but failed to be clear about which specific capped deals it was basing this assertion on, and when it was sensible to have committed to a capped rate deal.

Student finance

In 2011, Lewis launched the Independent Taskforce on Student Finance Information with former National Union of Students president Wes Streeting and backed by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, to provide information to potential students about the changes to tuition fees and student loans resulting from the Browne Review. After subtle changes to student loan repayments were announced in the Autumn Statement of 2015, Lewis appealed directly to the Prime Minister and engaged lawyers to investigate. He asserted that freezing the repayment threshold would represent a retroactive hike in student loan costs that could "destroy any trust" that students have in the student finance and political systems.

Mental health and debt

In 2016, Lewis launched and provided funding for the Money and mental health Policy Institute, a think tank directed by former Liberal Democrat adviser Polly Mackenzie to study the link between mental health issues and debt.

Others

Other large scale campaigns, with ensuing television programmes, include reclaiming payment protection insurance (it is predicted that this may grow to the same scale as bank charge reclaiming), reclaiming mortgage exit fees and reclaiming credit card charges, all of which have resulted in over 100,000 template letter downloads, according to Lewis' website.

Recognition

Lewis became a Governor of the London School of Economics in 2008. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to consumer rights and to charitable services through the MSE Charity Fund.

Personal life

Lewis is married to long-time partner, former 5 News weather presenter Lara Lewington. They were married on 31 May 2009. She gave birth to Sapphire Susan Lewis, on 1 November 2012.

Other than money saving, Lewis declares his interests as playing Scrabble, golf and reading historic novels. Being born only a few miles from Maine Road in Withington, Manchester, he is a keen supporter of Manchester City. Lewis owns three gerbils. Their names are Spatula, Sputnik and Spondulix.

Lewis is Jewish and practises the Jewish faith.