Sunny Johal

The personal allowance has been frozen at £12,570 since 2021 and stays frozen until 2031. Left Foot Forward estimates the freeze costs a minimum wage earner £980 in extra income tax and NIC in 2026-27 and £1,137 in 2027-28.

Channel 4 Dispatches went undercover inside the Financial Ombudsman Service @financialombuds. What they filmed should have shut the place down. Their own staff said this on camera: "I'm not proud to admit it but I've done it myself. Just taken a chance and just slung stuff through, with any old decision." "You're more likely to meet your targets if you're not upholding them." 11,000 cases fell into a black hole for two years. Some of those letters said "I am going to lose my house." @UKParliament demanded answers. Baroness Ros Altmann called it shocking. MPs threatened a full inquiry. FOS said the footage was "not representative." Nothing changed. Fast forward to today. My own complaint against @rsagroup / @IntactInsurance is now being formally handled by Gary Smith @G8GWS of @MeridianLegals. Gary is the lawyer leading the FOS Litigation Group, a group built on over 1,000 documented FOS failures. He is preparing a judicial review of the FOS. My case has been submitted by Meridian as my regulated representative because what happened to me fits the same pattern Channel 4 filmed. If you have had a complaint dismissed by the FOS and you believe it was handled without proper scrutiny, contact Gary directly at Meridian Legal Services. 0121 516 0675 @MeridianLegals The full transcript of what @C4Dispatches filmed inside the FOS is in the comments. Read it and tell me this is not exactly what is still happening today.

SUED FOR SPEAKING UP Andrew Burgess criticised property "guru" Samuel Leeds. Leeds sued him for over £1m. Andrew won. The claim was struck out. Five years on, @DanNeidle says the fight to recover the legal costs goes on. Win in court. Still pay for it.

BBC PAID HIM 6X MORE. THE TRIBUNAL SAID THAT WAS ILLEGAL. Samira Ahmed @SamiraAhmedUK presented Newswatch on @BBC for years. Same format. Same length. Same job. Read viewer feedback on camera, wrap it up, go home. Jeremy Vine @theJeremyVine did exactly the same thing on Points of View. She got £440 per episode. He got £3,000. Ahmed spent years trying to fix it quietly through internal BBC processes. The BBC said there was no problem. She filed for tribunal. In January 2020, the tribunal ruled unanimously in her favour. The BBC could not explain the difference. They tried. They argued Vine needed "a glint in the eye" and to be "cheeky." The tribunal said that was not a skill. It was a story the BBC told itself. The total underpayment was close to £700,000. Sarah Montague, another BBC woman, settled separately for around £400,000. The National Union of Journalists flagged around 70 more cases waiting resolution internally. After Ahmed won, 700 BBC women received pay rises. The BBC's statement after losing? They regretted it had gone to tribunal. Not that they paid a woman six times less than a man for the same work for years. Just that it became public. Sources: @guardian, @BBC, @IFJGlobal, Others

SIX BANKERS JAILED Sally Masterton was a forensic accountant at Lloyds Banking Group (@LBGplc). In 2013 she wrote an internal report, Project Lord Turnbull, documenting how HBOS executives had deliberately concealed a £1 billion fraud at their Reading branch before Lloyds acquired them. Small businesses destroyed. Lives ruined. Fraud siphoning money to pay for kickbacks, prostitutes and Barbados holidays. She was pushed out in 2014. Lloyds publicly denied the report was even authorised. They called her a rogue employee acting alone. The police, meanwhile, were writing letters saying her work was vital to their investigation and trying to have her co-opted onto the case. @TheFCA received the report in 2014. They did nothing for years. Nothing. The regulator whose entire job is to catch this exact thing sat on it. Six HBOS executives were eventually jailed for a combined 47 years. The fraud was real. The cover-up was real. Masterton was right about all of it. Lloyds settled with her twice. The second time, in 2018, they formally admitted the report was commissioned by the bank and apologised, saying she had acted with integrity and good faith. That is what institutions call justice when they want to avoid the word sorry. The FCA was fined £45 million for concealing the fraud. Not a single board-level executive was held accountable. The £45 million fine went straight to the Treasury. Thames Valley Police spent £7 million investigating a fraud they could never recover from the fraudsters. The Chancellor at the time refused to reimburse them. A woman who did her job was fired, smeared, and silenced with a non-disclosure agreement. The people who covered up a billion-pound fraud kept their careers. Nothing about any of this was an accident. MP Kevin Hollinrake (@kevinhollinrake) called her treatment disgraceful. He was right. It was also completely predictable for anyone who knows how these institutions protect themselves. Share this if you think the public deserves to know. Sources: @FinancialTimes @CityAM @businessinsider | Blueprint for Free Speech | Parliamentary Written Evidence