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Welcome to the symposium, introductions and initial exploration of the main issues; by 

Andy Agathangelou

 Founder, Transparency Task Force;  Governor, Pensions Policy Institute; Chair, Secretariat Committee, APPG on Pension Scams; Chair, Secretariat Committee, APPG on Personal Banking and Fairer Financial Services; Chair of the Violation Tracker UK Advisory Board

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Presentation #1, for 5 minutes + 10 minutes Q&A/Discussion by

Martin Lewis

Founder and Chair, The MoneySavingExpert.com, 

and The Money & Mental Health Policy Institute;  

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Presentation #2, for 10 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A/Discussion by

Heather Buchanan

Director of Policy, APPG on Fair Business Banking

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Presentation #3, for 15 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A/Discussion by

Dominic Lindley

Director of Policy, New City Agenda; and Secretariat, APPG on Mortgage Prisoners

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Presentation #4, for 5 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A/Discussion by

Stephanie Orr

Policy Officer, Surviving Economic Abuse  

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Presentation #5, for 5 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A/Discussion by

Rachel Neale

Lead Campaigner, UK Mortgage Prisoners 

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General discussion/Q&A, for 25 minutes

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Final conclusions and suggested next steps

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Close to the formal proceedings.

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*The programme will continuously evolve, so is subject to change. 

Martin Lewis
Founder and Chair, The MoneySavingExpert.com and The Money & Mental Health Policy Institute

Martin Lewis OBE, the Money Saving Expert, founded his website in 2003 and is currently its Executive Chair. He’s an award-winning campaigning journalist, TV and radio presenter, newspaper columnist, charity founder, author and according to Google, the UK’s most searched-for British man.

Born in Manchester in 1972, he grew up in Cheshire’s Delamere Forest. These days he lives in London with his wife, BBC Click presenter Lara (aka Mrs MSE), and eight-year-old daughter Sapphire (aka Mini MSE). For some colour about Martin and his life… 

• Listen to his BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs.
• Watch his ITV How to be successful documentary.
• Read The Guardian’s How Martin Lewis became Britain’s most trusted man or the Financial Times’s profile of Martin.

Yet if you’re the Wikipedia type and want the exhaustive (exhausting) ‘Who is Martin Lewis?’ list of stats and facts, read on (remember, if there’s a conflict between this page and the crowdsourced Martin Lewis Wiki entry, it’s correct here, not there)…

Founder & Chair, MoneySavingExpert.com

Martin set up this site in his living room in 2003 for a total capital outlay of £80. With a focus on how to cut bills without cutting back, it soon saw explosive growth. And very quickly it became the UK’s biggest consumer site, a title it has now held for well over a decade.

The site has also long resided in the top 100 biggest sites in the UK, and now has over 16 million monthly users. For more on how it got here, read the history of MoneySavingExpert.com.

In many ways, the site’s success was powered by the Martin’s Money Tips weekly email (these days it has been slightly renamed to the MSE Money Tips email). Over 14 million people have signed up to be sent that email and it’s received by over seven million active addresses.

In 2012, MSE joined the MoneySupermarket Group – with Martin continuing in his role as Editor-in-Chief. At the end of 2015, the period contracted in the sale, the contractual relationship was over and Martin could have left (or been asked to leave).

Yet no one wanted that. So in 2016 Martin moved from Editor-in-Chief to a permanent new role as MSE’s Executive Chair, overseeing the site, focusing on journalism and content quality, ethics, strategy and creativity. A role he relished and continues to do to this day – still playing the leading role in MSE and what it does.

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Heather Buchanan
Director of Policy, New City Agenda; and Secretariat, APPG on Mortgage Prisoners 

Heather Buchanan is the Director of Policy for the APPG on Fair Business Banking where she sets the strategic focus of the group and has 7 years’ worth of experience successfully working in UK Parliament for positive change on behalf of small business. She regularly advises MPs, peers, Government departments, regulators, trade bodies and civil society on the commercial relationships between businesses and their lenders. The work of the Group, in conjunction with other key stakeholders, led to the expansion of the remit of the FOS and the creation of the BBRS. Heather co-founded the Bankers for Net Zero initiative which puts small business at the heart of the banking sector’s transition and has been announced as the first country chapter of the UN convened global Net Zero Banking Alliance, putting banking commitments into action in a local context. She is on the advisory panel for the Transparency Task Force and is a member of the UK Finance SME Advisory Group. Heather was on the Steering Committee of the BankingFutures project and has also contributed to the Lending Standards Board Standards of Lending Practice for Business Customers.

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Dominic Lindley
Independent Financial Services Consultant

Dominic Lindley is Interim Proposition Lead in the Customer Data Protection Unit working on Privacy Law, Regulatory Design and the frameworks for Redress. 

Dominic is focussed on unlocking the benefits of Open Finance for consumers by making sure they have the skills, knowledge and motivation to use new Open Finance enabled services and that they are protected and have access to redress if anything goes wrong.

He has worked for the Consumer Panel, Which? and New City Agenda, delivering improvements for consumers. He has advised the Open Banking Implementation Entity and is a member of the MAPS Pensions Dashboards Programme Steering Group and the FRC Advisory Council.  He has written two leading reports on Pensions Dashboards for Which? and the People’s Pension.

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Stephanie Orr
Policy Officer, Surviving Economic Abuse

Stephanie Orr has worked in the voluntary sector in various support roles for the last 6 years. Following an unusual pathway into the VAWG sector, her passion for supporting survivors of gender-based violence started whilst studying for a PhD in Chemistry when she began volunteering at her local Rape Crisis Centre, taking on a number of roles including regularly providing helpline support. Since then, Stephanie has worked as an advocate, supporting survivors of forced marriage and honour-based abuse and working one-to-one with women and girls experiencing domestic abuse who were assessed to be at high risk of homicide or serious harm. Most recently, Stephanie has delivered a project in Children’s Services, training, consulting, and working in partnership with social workers to improve responses to domestic abuse within a local authority.

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Rachel Neale
Lead Campaigner, UK Mortgage Prisoners

Rachel first became involved with mortgage prisoners when she was asked to be filmed for the Panorama documentary “Trapped by my mortgage”. From then she began to lead the campaign through the Facebook group. Her mortgage is held with Landmark.

She has worked hard to bring change to those that are trapped after the 2008 financial crash and now work with different organisations to bring mortgage prisoners support for mental health and debt. She works on case studies against those unregulated firms and banks who treat their members unfairly.

She is the chair on the committee at Harcus Parker for the group litigation. They have helped set up the APPG for Mortgage Prisoners in parliament and work closely to bring legislation change.

Rachel also sits as a stakeholder for UK Mortgage Prisoners on the solutions group as a spokesperson. She has spoken in parliament at the mortgage prisoners debate held on 6th June 2020.

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