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. Although in the following days he announced that in association with other consumer groups he had 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".
The updated template letters allowing individuals to attempt to recover bank charges individually was further delayed from the promised date of the third week of January 2010
eventually being published late on 2 February 2010 although that then concentrated mainly on reclaiming on financial hardship grounds only, with hopes for further information regarding claims on legal grounds made via courts to "go live in the next couple of weeks"; the guide was eventually published late on 24 February 2010.
Lewis initially admitted "our instinctive guess is even with the new argument there is only a 10-20% chance of most people now getting charges back". although in his later updated guide said 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 & 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.
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.
