Financial ombudsman rebuked by MPs over handling of ex-chief's ‘dismissal'
The peer and chairwoman had been asked by MPs to explain why Ms Thomas had stepped down from her role as chief executive of the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) and whether any severance package was agreed.
She declined to do so, saying only that the move had been a 'mutual agreement' and citing her 'duties to safeguard the wellbeing of our employees' and 'protect the interests' of the ombudsman service.
In a letter to the committee on February 19, Baroness Manzoor claimed that 'as a member of the House of Lords, I cannot be required either to attend before the committee, or or to answer its questions,' the report says.
In Monday's report, MPs said that 'although this argument was strictly true' because Commons committees have no power to compel the Lords, 'it was unnecessary and disrespectful'.
Following Baroness Manzoor's letter, the committee ordered the FOS to submit details of any severance deal or financial package and any confidentiality or non-disclosure agreement negotiated between the service and Ms Thomas.
Although the FOS complied with the order, the committee has not published the details, claiming its decision not to do so reflects 'our awareness of the need to balance transparency against fairness to individuals.'
In its report, the committee sums up the reason for Ms Thomas' dismissal as a 'collapse in confidence' driven by 'fundamental disagreements' over strategy and operations between the board and the former chief executive.
'This collapse in confidence covered a broad range of issues and was not driven by a single event or topic,' it says.
'The mutual collapse in confidence led the FOS Board to dismiss Abby Thomas.'
Treasury Committee chairwoman Dame Meg Hillier said the service's failure to block Commons scrutiny should send a 'clear message' to others seeking to frustrate the process.
'I'm afraid that the handling of this situation by the senior leadership of the Financial Ombudsman Service has been deeply disappointing,' she said.
'The attempt to frustrate a House of Commons Committee from scrutinising the actions of a publicly accountable organisation ultimately proved unsuccessful.
'I hope this sends a clear message to any organisation considering similar action in future that Members of the House of Commons will have answers to the questions they ask on behalf of the British public, whether senior officials attempt to block them or not.'
Baroness Manzoor said: 'I highly value the Treasury Select Committee and the important role it plays in holding the financial sector to account.
'I am committed to providing open and transparent evidence to the committee, but there are rare instances when that can be difficult – particularly when it relates to employment matters.
'I have always treated the committee with the utmost seriousness and respect, and I know the Financial Ombudsman Service will continue to work closely with them in the future.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
17 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Commons at pompous worst as Afghan data breach proves too much bother for Badenoch
For a moment it felt as if the dam might be about to burst. To let the anger in. On Tuesday, the Commons had been at its most pompous, most clubbable worst. Drowning in self-righteousness as the defence secretary, John Healey, gave a statement on the leaked Afghan email, the superinjunction and the £850m bill to the taxpayer. It was deeply regrettable, MPs on all sides agreed, but in the end probably just one of those things. Best to move on and not rock the boat. Parliament at its best and all that. On Wednesday, we got to hear Keir Starmer's view on the scandal in his opening remarks at prime minister's questions. He seemed to have moved on from Healey's acquiescent cover-up. Yes, Labour in opposition had shared the previous government's commitment to protecting Afghans who had worked for the UK army, but he had consistently warned of the Tories' handling of the crisis. The failings were manifold and former ministers had a great deal to answer for. The gloves were off. This was a party political issue. And that was the last we heard about the cover-up. Kemi Badenoch had nothing to say about it at all. Not even in passing. Maybe she didn't think it was that important. After all she couldn't be bothered to attend an urgent security briefing about it back in March. Yes, she is that lazy. She only got to find out on Monday. But then almost everything is too much bother for Kemi. God knows what would happen if she wound up in Downing Street. Luckily, no one is about to find out. Or maybe she didn't want to land Ben Wallace and Grant Shapps in it. On their watch, there had been several data breaches. It was almost embedded as part of the system. She could even have had a go at Robert Jenrick, who as immigration minister had been responsible for running a secret scheme to admit Afghans into the country while at the same time building a career based on hostility towards foreigners. Then Tories seem able to live with that level of hypocrisy. Whatever. Kemi kept silent. But what of the backbenchers? Surely one of them would have wanted to have their say on a cover-up that had not only been kept secret from parliament and the public but from the very people whose data had been leaked. I guess the thinking was it's best not to know if a Taliban death squad is after you. No. Not one of them. Not even Tory Lincoln Jopp, who picked up a Military Cross on active service and commanded the Scots guards in Afghanistan in 2010. Afghans? Lincoln didn't remember them. Not today. It makes you wonder why these people went into politics in the first place. Was it really to be lobby fodder for the whips? To do as they are told on the off-chance they get a promotion to minister or shadow minister? Is that the summit of their ambition? A gleaming red box and the occasional use of a shiny black limo? This was a huge, huge story. A government using a superinjunction for far longer than was necessary. Not to protect the men and women whose data had been leaked: that information had almost certainly ended up in the hands of the Taliban years ago. But to cover up the previous Tory government's blushes. Not just the leak but their embarrassment of running a secret immigration scheme at the time they were encouraging everyone to hate foreigners. So if not this, what do backbenchers care about? What will wake them from their comatose state? The kindest thing that can be said about the rest of this week's episode of PMQs was that it was like a third rate panto coming near to the end of its run with its two stars merely going through the motions. Affected anger, pre-cooked put-down and a general lack of interest. Summer recess can't come soon enough for Keir and Kemi. They have both long since run out of ideas. Just counting down the days till the Commons packs up on Tuesday. Kemi basically reused the same questions she had used at the last three PMQs. She may be a climate sceptic but she thinks highly of recycling her own ideas. Ideal for someone who has made a virtue of never doing more than was strictly necessary. Why go the extra mile when you can stay in bed picking fights on X? It also says a lot about her ambition. It hasn't been as if her last three outings at the dispatch box have been a great success. More like a scoreless draw. But we are where we are. Two leaders who would quite like to be anywhere but in the Commons on a Wednesday lunchtime. Kemi going on and on about how the economy had been in tiptop shape last summer and had been tanking steadily since Labour took over. Keir going on and on about the dreadful legacy Labour had been left and how things were now basically looking up. You could take your pick. Maybe things had never been that great and still weren't. Not for the first time, one of the more interesting contributions came from Ed Davey. He talked of war crimes in Gaza and suggested Benjamin Netanyahu should be hit with sanctions. Starmer was like a rabbit in the headlights. He keeps saying how appalled he is, but his appalledness never reaches a level where he is actually moved to do anything about it. You can imagine him standing by an aid truck doing nothing while the IDF take pot shots at children, tears in his eyes as he says how appalled he is. The rest is best forgotten. Graham Stuart trying to be funny by comparing the Labour manifesto to The Salt Path and asking Starmer to name his summer read. It would be nice to report that Starmer said Taking the Lead by John Crace but he couldn't think that fast on his feet. Jopp also fancied himself as a comedian by suggesting Jofra Archer and the England Test win showed Labour needed more pace and less spin. A gag that died on its arse as it was spin bowler Shoaib Bashir who took the winning wicket. Recess can't come a minute too soon.
Scottish Sun
19 minutes ago
- Scottish Sun
WHSmith posts urgent warning to shoppers so they don't lose out on cash as it rebrands 500 high street stores
Read about the history of WHSmith below... SHOP TO IT WHSmith posts urgent warning to shoppers so they don't lose out on cash as it rebrands 500 high street stores Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) WHSMITH customers have been warned they need to spend their unused gift vouchers before they become worthless. The struggling retailer is set to disappear from the high street in a matter of weeks as its new owner rebrands it to TGJones. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 1 WHSmith has sold its high street shops which are being rebranded Credit: Getty The stationery giant has been a feature of the British high street since the 1800s but has fallen on hard times in recent years. Now Sun checkers can reveal bosses at the ailing favourite are already reminding punters to use their unspent gift vouchers in stores while they are still valid up until the end of June next year. Signs headed "Important Notice on Changes to WHSmith Gift Cards' erected at the firm's Croydon branch in south London state: 'This store, along with all other former high street stores, is now owned and operated by TG Jones. 'This has an impact on how you can use your WHSmith gift card or eGift card. 'You can continue to use your WHSmith gift card or eGift card in this store and in other TGJones, and on up until June 28, 2026, in accordance with the terms and conditions for your WHSmith gift card or eGift card. 'Before and after June 28, 2026, you may continue to use your WHSmith gift card or eGift card in WHSmith stores in travel locations and hospitals (excluding concessions and stores located at motorway service stations, WHSmith Local, London Underground sites or WHSmith franchise stores), in accordance with the terms and conditions for your WHSmith gift card or eGift card.' Consumer experts have urged shoppers to use their vouchers before it's too late. Martyn James, Sun Squeeze Team Member and independent consumer champion, said: 'When a company goes bust, then your vouchers, gift cards and even store credit vanish, never to be seen again. "So, when you hear that a business is in trouble, spend,spend, spend, or lose your credit. 'However, WHSmith didn't go bust, it was purchased by another business. WHSmith sells 500 UK shops "Where this happens and the business rebrands, it is usually down to the business on whether it must honour credit vouchers and gift cards. 'This often depends on whether it was a direct takeover (usually honoured) or the sale of a failing business (the new retailer doesn't take on liability). 'In this case, WHSmith customers have less than a year to spend their vouchers, which in fairness, is often how long they last before expiring anyway. "But, if you have vouchers, get online or in-store and spend them - or risk losing the credit forever.' WHSmith stores that have closed A total of 20 WHSmith stores shut this year ahead of the rebrand. The retailer's Bedford site is set to close on July 5. The store in the Frenchgate Centre in Doncaster closed on May 31, while the Stockton branch also shut on May 17. Branches in Halstead and Woolwich shut on April 12, and Halesowen and Diss followed on April 19. Just a week later, stores in Newport and Haverhill also pulled down the shutters. Reena Sewraz, Which? retail editor, added: 'Usually if a retailer you have a gift card for goes bust, you may struggle to get your money back. 'In this case, WHSmith has been bought and rebranded as TGJones and existing gift cards and vouchers can be used both online and in store up until June 28, 2026. 'Before and after this date, you can still redeem vouchers at WHSmith travel locations, including airports and hospitals. 'If the gift card or voucher was bought through a third party, check to see if the purchaser can approach them for a refund. "The purchaser has no right to a refund but the third-party company may choose to refund you as a gesture of goodwill." Hobbycraft owner Modella Capital agreed a deal to take over the chain's troubled high street arm back in March. As part of the deal, all 464 remaining high street stores are rebranding to TGJones. The sale has now officially completed and the WHSmith website has rebranded, while all stores are listed on Google as TGJones. Some shoppers have already spotted signs going up in stores reading 'Thank you for shopping at TGJones.' Modella put in planning applications to local councils to change the signage on its stores last month. History of WHSmith The rebranding means the WHSmith name will be disappearing from the high street for good. WHSmith's travel stores will still remain in airports, hospitals, railway stations and motorway service areas as these have not been taken over by Modella. The first WHSmith store was opened back in 1792 was opened by Henry Walton Smith and his wife Anna. It was located in Little Grosvenor Street, London and was initially a news vendor. When Henry and Anna died, the business was taken over by their youngest son William Henry Smith. He renamed the business WH Smith & Son in 1846. The business began expanding around this time and opened its first railway news stand at Euston Station in 1848. It opened its first depots two years later in Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. WH Smith & Son continued to be passed down by the family before becoming a limited company in 1928, with all shares owned by the third Viscount. The company became a public limited business in 1948, with staff and members of the public taking shares. The business expanded hugely between the 1970s and 1990s, and during this time changed its name to simply WHSmith. The last member of the Smith family left the board in 1996. Over the years, the brand has sold a variety of products including everything from vinyl records to DVDs and computer games. But it has always been best known for its wide variety of books, stationery, and sweets. In more recent years, WHSmith has struggled on the high street – although its travel sales have surged. The company confirmed in January it would sell off its high street business. Modella then snapped up WHSmith's high street stores after an auction process. Shoppers have also started receiving emails from TGJones. One confused customer wrote on social media: 'I got an email from TG Jones thinking how? Then realised its WHSmith's new name, crazy.' Another added: 'I keep getting emails from someone called TG Jones and it was apparently a company that has changed its name, it was failing to tell me what company…just had another one and it's WHSmith??? WHAT.' Other customers have expressed sadness at the loss of the iconic retailer from Britain's high streets. One wrote: 'New generation will never experience the feeling of going to WHSmith in your Year 6 summer holidays and building a pencil case from scratch and picking all your stationary for Year 7.' Another sad shopper added: 'I did my school shopping every year at WHSmith since reception, same with my sister too, this is so sad.' While a third nostalgic punter wrote: 'My parents met working at WHSmith and they've been married 30 years.' Modella were contacted for comment. Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@ Plus, you can join our Sun Money Chats and Tips Facebook group to share your tips and stories
New Statesman
20 minutes ago
- New Statesman
Katie Lam: 'Margaret Thatcher left power before I was born'
Illustration by Ellie Foreman Peck We were on our second glass of wine and Katie Lam was ready to talk about the spiralling fortunes of the Conservative Party. 'We're still less than a year from the biggest electoral defeat in modern British political history. The public's not ready to forgive us,' she said of the recent spate of polls that show the Tories pushed down into third and even fourth place. 'There were some major, major failings – and the public's very angry, very reasonably.' The 33-year-old MP for Weald of Kent is about as Conservative as they come. She's been an adviser to Boris Johnson in No 10 and Suella Braverman in the Home Office. She won her constituency in July with one of the highest on-paper Tory majorities, joining the two-dozen new Conservative MPs entering parliament after an election in which her party lost 250 seats. It's been barely a year, but in the think tank conference rooms and Westminster bars where the wounded Tory community can still be sighted, Lam is being whispered about with words like 'fiery', 'authentic', 'fearless in debate' and 'the real deal'. Ask a Conservative who they think is the one to watch out of the limping new parliamentary cohort and chances are you'll hear the name Katie Lam. At the Westwell wine estate in the picture-perfect Kent village of Charing, between Ashford and Maidstone, none of that was on the agenda. In a dark-green dress and trainers well suited to examining vines, Lam was just another local MP, squeezing in a tour of the winery in between two primary school visits and a meeting with parish councillors. After a detailed conversation with the owner about cellar-door relief, post-Brexit equipment import costs, energy prices and R&D funding for viticulture science, we were handed glasses of Westwell's flagship sparkling vintage. In between digressions on karaoke, Tory WhatsApp groups and why Britain needs to leave the ECHR, I tried to figure out how Lam became the Tories' rising star. Lam has undoubtedly entered parliament at a difficult time: she is part of the smallest Tory cohort in modern history. Parliamentary arithmetic has shoved her into the spotlight long before one might expect even Westminster obsessives to know her name. As well as serving as an opposition whip, she holds a shadow Home Office brief. It was in this capacity that she dashed from her office to the Commons chamber on the last Tuesday before the Easter recess to respond to a statement from Jess Phillips on the government's action on the grooming gangs scandal, clutching a speech hot off the printer. 'It was a mad, mad 48 hours,' she told me. For an opposition response of this nature, 'you would normally want a couple of days to write and source and fact-check that… I think we had about an hour and 40 minutes' notice.' Her speech included harrowing details from the court transcripts of grooming cases; because of Lam, Hansard now contains the quote: 'We're here to fuck all the white girls and fuck the government.' 'I hadn't said it aloud before I stood up and said it in the chamber, because I literally finished writing it as I sent it to the printer… I didn't consider it to be a particularly explosive thing to have said.' She paused. 'It went down very, very badly in the room.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe But whatever Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs in the mostly empty chamber made of Lam's intervention, the outside world had other ideas. Her speech was clipped online and has been viewed tens of thousands of times. By the time Lam returned to her desk, she had emails of support from 'well over a hundred people, which became well over a thousand people… It's a useful reminder that the chamber is not the country.' The daughter of a primary school teacher and a small business owner, Lam has been a Conservative 'for as long as I can remember'. It very much does not run in the family: her great-great-grandfather was a socialist politician in Germany who had to flee with his family from the Nazis. It's the kind of story fit for a high-octane Netflix drama, involving a prison break through a window and a dash across borders to run a resistance radio station. Her grandparents met delivering leaflets for the Labour Party in the 1940s – she has previously joked that she 'wouldn't be here without the Mill Hill Labour Party'. Yet, somehow, by the time she was 'politically sentient' Lam had decided her values were fiercely Conservative. 'The first general election I remember was 2001 when I was nine,' she recalled. 'I felt very strongly that we should keep the pound. I can't tell you now exactly why that was, but I know that was what I thought.' Skirting over the fact that, as political awakenings go, the attempts of William Hague to rescue his party from electoral oblivion is about as relevant as they come for a Conservative MP today, Lam has a CV tailor-made for politics. She ticks both the 'state school' and 'Oxbridge classics degree' boxes, having studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. She explained that, while her school didn't offer either Latin or Greek at GCSE, she was so inspired by one of her teachers that she insisted on taking them independently. ('My poor old parents! I went home and I was like: 'I'm going to need a Greek teacher.'') She was both president of the Cambridge Union and chair of the Cambridge University Conservative Association, in between theatrical antics that included a production of Jerry Springer: The Opera, complete with pyrotechnics. Her one regret from Cambridge, she told me, was not doing her dissertation on a comparison between Eminem and Ovid. She went to work at Goldman Sachs, hoping for a grounding in how business works. Six years in, a chance encounter at the Conservative Party Conference (accompanied by her father, who joined the party in solidarity with his daughter) landed her a job with the Boris Johnson adviser Andrew Griffith in No 10. The 2019 election was called weeks later, Griffith became an MP, and Lam was suddenly deputy Downing Street chief of staff and head of the Prime Minister's business team. 'It's all worked out in retrospect, but it was not planned,' she insisted. After her time in No 10, she was chief policy adviser at the advisory firm Portland, answering 'quite basic questions like: 'I deal with both these government departments; how are they talking to one another?' And the answer is usually: not at all!' A stint at an AI company and a return to government, this time in the Home Office, kept her busy until she was selected for the blue-as-can-be seat of Weald of Kent in 2023. In her spare time, she wrote a number of musicals, one an adaptation of The Railway Children. On the stifling hot June day we met, Lam was as relaxed discussing what the government can do to support English vineyards – from reforming alcohol duty rates to reversing the national insurance threshold hike that has made it harder for small businesses to hire new staff – as she was admitting her obsession with Abba or enthusing about co-chairing the newly minted all-party parliamentary group for classics. She gave off the vibe of a school prefect from an Enid Blyton novel (indeed, she was head girl at school), turning from bubbly to stern in a flash when asked about the prospects of replacing Kemi Badenoch a leader, which she said would be 'inappropriate' to speculate on. She has the Duracell Bunny energy associated with the shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, whom she backed in the leadership contest. A slickly produced 'day in the life' video on Instagram shows her scoffing pizza, riding in a squad car with Kent Police, scaling the 99 steps of All Saints Church in Staplehurst and cuddling her golden retriever Bailey. One almost expects her to burst into song, Rodgers-and-Hammerstein style, about the charmed life of a Kent MP. For all that, while her social media game and love of theatre might code her towards the centre left of her party, it is the right of the depleted Tory ecosystem that is most dazzled by Lam. 'I don't know – if somebody said 'the right', what would qualify them for that?' she said, then reeled off a list of views that put her firmly in that category: a belief in a much smaller state ('I don't say that as an ideological thing – but to function, no organisation of that kind of size could work well'), a less regulated economy and a Britain outside the European Convention on Human Rights. 'Restoring the border and fixing the immigration situation is a condition of anybody who takes power in Britain,' she said, echoing the leadership pitch Jenrick, to whom she remains close, made last year. 'And I can't see how we can possibly control the border within the ECHR.' Videos of her parliamentary interventions on the subject have cemented her appeal among the Tory hardliners frustrated by Badenoch's indecisiveness. (The Conservative leader has commissioned David Wolfson, the shadow attorney general, to review whether the UK should leave the ECHR – a move Lam diplomatically said she supports.) Is she worried about the threat of Reform in her constituency? The latest Electoral Calculus MPR poll has Nigel Farage's party claiming what should be this safe Tory seat. 'A lot of the people who live here would consider themselves to be classic deep-seated lifelong Conservatives, and we know that a lot of those people have voted Reform, which is obviously very painful for somebody like me.' Her hope is that right-of-centre voters in Weald of Kent 'will not want the sort of economy that Reform will end up suggesting'. She called Farage's decision to muscle in to Labour turf by announcing he'd remove the two-child benefit cap 'a strange un-aspirational policy… If you're already on universal credit and can't afford to have another child without the two-child benefit cap being raised, then you shouldn't have another child.' Lam claimed not to have a political hero that would help onlookers place her within the Tory universe. 'There are, throughout history, inspirational leaders – Thatcher, Churchill, going all the way back Henry VII, Pitt the Younger, Pericles,' she said. 'But I'm a little bit sceptical of heroes in that sort of way, just because I think no time is like the other.' She has blemished her prefect image by challenging the Tory doctrine that Margaret Thatcher has all the answers. At an event at the Centre for Policy Studies, the think tank co-founded by the Iron Lady herself, Lam suggested her party might want to move on from the 1980s. She was adamant she didn't criticise Thatcher ('There hasn't been a by-election… I've still got the whip!'), but maintained that some distance might be valuable. 'Margaret Thatcher left power before I was born, and she took over the Conservative Party over 50 years ago. That's half a century; the world is such a different place… You can learn lessons from history books, but they can't tell you what to do.' It's a bold Conservative politician who doesn't hold Thatcher up as a personal inspiration. Bolder still, Lam is prepared to give the Labour government credit where she believes it is due, such as on Wes Streeting's abolition of NHS England. A pragmatist, when it comes to slashing quangos, she doesn't mind who does it, as long as it gets done. 'I think we've got, by a factor of hundreds, far too many bodies, additional layers that remove responsibility and accountability,' she said. 'The classic metaphor is levers of government. The thing lots of people say is you pull the lever and nothing happens. Increasingly the British state is so broken that you pull the lever and the lever comes off in your hand.' On a Tuesday night the week after our interview, Lam was in a hot room on London's Great Smith Street, home of another right-wing think tank – the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), once much-beloved of Liz Truss. The Next Generation project run by the ASI is all about revitalising Conservatism, finding ways to modernise and turbocharge its offering to young people. Lam was there to talk about the history of liberalism, and how conservativism is not just compatible with but reliant on it. 'Real English liberalism,' she said, is about 'small families', 'a free economy', 'freedom of speech, conscience and association', and 'a political model in which the people, not judges or bureaucrats, are the ultimate constitutional backstop'. She made the liberal case for border control, calling the UK's immigration system 'our recent fit of madness' and adding that for most of Britain's past 'we'd never dream of putting the rights of the foreign criminal above the safety of our own people'. There was particular enthusiasm among the crowd of young think-tankers, parliamentary aides and general Westminster hangers-on when she linked the decline of 'classical liberalism' in Britain (as opposed to the type of progressive liberalism beloved by the left) to the housing crisis – which she blames on '20th-century socialism'. One Lam fan I spoke to called her 'refreshingly normal' for a Conservative MP. Another simply said: 'She gets it.' They were intoxicated by her combination of an unapologetically hardline stance on immigration with a focus on the challenges faced by younger people, who have tended to be ignored by a Tory party obsessed with the pensioner vote. She is challenging the notion of youth being left-coded, offering a vision of Conservatism specifically to appeal to a younger generation. Whether it will have much appeal beyond the think tanks of Westminster remains to be seen: just 5 per cent of voters aged 18 to 24 say they'd vote Tory. Lam insisted to me it's 'important to resist categorisation' and refused to label herself a right-wing Tory. It's 'a bit weird', she argued, for politicians to brand themselves, revelling in 'identity-based politics'. 'I don't think that's healthy.' Much better to keep it vague and let people get to know her through her parliamentary speeches and musical performances. Her go-to karaoke song is Gloria Gaynor's 'I Will Survive' – an anthem for a rising star of today's Conservative Party if ever there was one. [See also: A question of intent] Related
