“I’m not a case study”, says the money expert and broadcaster Martin Lewis, politely but firmly batting away questions about his own mental health.
“I’m not being rude to you in any way. All I want to do is let people know that like many people, I have brittle mental health, and I have experienced my dark days, but I don’t see the need to make that public.”
Lewis’s career has been built on talking fluently and precisely but when it comes to mental health issues perhaps actions speak louder than words.
The 52-year-old, who became fabulously rich in 2012 when he sold his MoneySavingExpert.com website for a reported £87m, founded his charity, the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, nine years ago.
Of his motivation, he has spoken of his growing realisation of the “marriage from hell” that is the combination of money problems and mental health issues. It is also known that Lewis lost his mother in a road accident two days before his 12th birthday. It made him reclusive as a teenager.
On receiving his windfall from the website sale, Lewis put £9m into a fund for charitable giving. “We have to protect people,” he says. “We have to protect people who can’t protect themselves, and we sometimes have to protect people from themselves within the mental health world.”
Thanks to smart investments, the fund has enabled £12.5m in charitable donations so far, of which £4.7m has gone to the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, and it still has £8m in its coffers.
Lewis’s charity has chalked up some significant policy wins in its time, including changes to rules that forced lenders to send distressing letters to people in problem debt, and the introduction of a training module for all health professionals on the links between money and mental health problems.
On Thursday it received a long-desired endorsement, a “very, very powerful Kitemark”, with the announcement that it will join a handful of consumer bodies with “super complainant” status under the Enterprise Act.
A similar status is expected in relation to the Financial Services and Markets Act, widening the scope for potential activism. It may sound technical and bureaucratic, but that is the world in which Lewis works so effectively.
The status gives the charity the power to raise official complaints against regulators on behalf of a group of consumers, to which they and the government must respond. It is an opportunity to tackle systemic issues that Lewis will no doubt seize.
He is a inveterate doer and explains his plans while catching up with his 25,000-a-day steps target in a walk around Westfield shopping centre in White City, west London, after filming for ITV’s The Martin Lewis Money Show. “I didn’t quite make it last year – I did 24,700, average. So I need to sort myself out,” he says.
A first target could be the insurance industry. The charity has a “lived experience” group of 3,000 people who provide insights into the problems people with mental health issues are facing, and the disproportionate premiums being paid for travel policies is flashing red on the dashboard.
The testimony seen by the charity suggests, he says, that someone with severe depression is being charged an average of three times more than someone with no medical conditions.
“This jumps to an average of 11 times more for some for someone with severe bipolar, with some people with this condition having to pay prices at 27 times more than a person with no medical conditions,” Lewis adds. “The problem: is that justified?”
It is an opportune moment for the charity, headed by its chief executive, Helen Undy, to join the top tier of consumer bodies.
The Labour government has put economic growth at the top of its to-do list, and regulators, including the Financial Conduct Authority (to the initial concern of its chief executive, Nikhil Rathi), have been told to establish it as an official objective.
There is concern that the FCA’s consumer duty, under which banks and other financial institutions must set higher and clearer standards of protection for customers, could be rolled back in the name of deregulation and red-tape slashing.
“Of course, I have concerns about the deregulation push,” Lewis says. “That doesn’t mean I’m necessarily opposed to it, as long as it is done sensibly … I think we have to be very careful about unintended consequences of a lack of consumer protection by pushing for growth while businesses go for short-term profit.
“There are many things that are done out there where actually businesses look at it in the short term [such as] threatening people to pay with debt letters. Hugely counterproductive. All it does is catastrophise people’s finances, retrench them. They stop earning income, and you tend to collect less money. Signposting them to health [support] is better than threatening them.”
Lewis is equally withering about the manner in which the government scrapped the universal winter fuel payment for pensioners who did not receive means-tested benefits, which he said seemed to have been intended to send a signal to the markets about Labour’s credibility. “A poor decision, a bad policy,” he says. “If we are going to do this [go for growth], we need to do this cleverly, and there needs to be a little bit of listening, not just to business, but also to those people who look at what’s going on for consumers.
“My worry is that if we give free rein to some of the instincts that are out there, I think it could be detrimental”, he adds. “Having said that, I do accept the need to push the growth, so I’m waiting to see the balance.” It will be comforting to many that Lewis is there to keep an eye on the scales.
