TOMORROW. 10:00 AM. THIS IS IT. I have been fighting for five years. Five years of fabricated documents, blocked complaints, ignored evidence and unanswered letters. Five years of being told by insurers, by regulators, by a system designed to exhaust people, that I was wrong. That what I was seeing was not real. That I should give up. I did not give up. Tomorrow, something changes. The FOS Litigation Group launches at 10:00 AM. A website goes live. A judicial review challenge against FOS @financialombuds is coming. Over 1,000 consumers backed by twelve years of frontline evidence. Built and funded personally by Gary Smith @G8GWS, a man who stayed in this fight long after it stopped making commercial sense, because some things become bigger than business. I have followed this build. I have watched Gary refuse to walk away. I know what tomorrow represents in terms of sleepless nights, personal cost and sheer refusal to accept that ordinary people have no recourse against a system that fails them deliberately. If you have ever been let down by your bank, your insurer, or the service that was supposed to protect you, tomorrow is for you. If you have waited years for an answer that never came, tomorrow is for you. If you have ever felt completely alone against something that should never have had this much power over your life, tomorrow is for you. The system relied on us being isolated. On each of us fighting alone. On us running out of money, time and fight before anything changed. We are no longer isolated. Share this tomorrow. Tell everyone you know. Fund it if you can. Every single share matters. Every single person who steps forward matters. 1 July 2026. 10:00 AM. flg.org.uk

THE DAY EVERYTHING CHANGES I am a CNC programmer from Birmingham. I cut metal for a living. Five years ago I made the first insurance claim of my life with @rsagroup rebranded now to @IntactInsurance. Subsidence at my home. Something that should have been resolved in months. What followed changed everything I thought I knew about how this country treats ordinary people. Fabricated documents. Forensic metadata proving three files were manufactured within 83 minutes on a single afternoon. Created from nothing. I brought the evidence. I submitted it formally. I documented everything. The response from the Financial Ombudsman Service @financialombuds? A printing error. That is what five years of evidence, hundreds of pages, and a forensic analysis gets you. I sent a 122-page complaint to the office of Interim Chief Ombudsman James Dipple-Johnstone personally. His office told me I had reached the end of their process. The same office that sits above the Ombudsman who had issued a binding written instruction telling me to file that exact complaint. One organisation. Two contradictory positions. Zero accountability. I contacted over 100 law firms. I tried no win no fee, pay by the hour, every combination possible. Silence. A quick no. Sometimes both. Even claims management companies did not bother. I stood completely alone. I kept going anyway. Along the way I found something unexpected. Data. A Warwick University study published November 2024 found the real consumer uphold rate at FOS is approximately 24%. FOS publishes 37%. That gap represents hundreds of thousands of people told they had been treated fairly when they had not. On @Glassdoor, 30% of 1,446 FOS staff reviews are one star. The single largest rating category. Investigators describing rushed closures driven by weekly targets, with the evidence in the file treated as secondary. In 2018, @Channel4 Dispatches sent a reporter undercover inside FOS. Staff admitted they did not understand the products they were ruling on. One said openly they had just "slung stuff through with any old decision." Cases were pre-rehearsed for a visiting MP to make the service look competent. Hundreds of thousands of decisions may have been wrong. FOS responded by commissioning an independent review. The reviewer found no institutional bias. He joined the FCA board the following year. He became Interim FCA Chair in 2022. He has been reappointed twice. The man who reviewed FOS now sits at the top of the regulator overseeing it. This is architecture. Nobody can afford to challenge it alone. Then I met Gary Smith @G8GWS of @MeridianLegals. Gary has spent twelve years on the front line of FOS complaints. His company has invested over £2 million supporting more than 1,500 consumers, much of it No Win No Fee, while cases sat in queues for years. He stayed long after it stopped being profitable. He has watched elderly consumers wait endlessly. He has seen complainants die before their cases were concluded. Gary did not walk away. I have been approached to support other initiatives and promote other ideas. I turned them all down. I did not feel the genuine commitment to people that drives real change. Gary has that commitment. I have watched him build this for years. Quietly. Persistently. Refusing to let it go. Three days before launch, FOS instructed lawyers to write to Gary personally. The same firm used in 2024. The same broad allegations. No post identified. No word quoted. No inaccuracy particularised. A letter that cost consumers £3,540 in scheme levy money last time it arrived. This is what an institution that cannot answer the substance looks like when someone finally holds it to account. FLG proceeds. Today, 1 July 2026, at 10:00 AM, the FOS Litigation Group website goes live. FOS is the final stage for most consumers. When a public body acts unlawfully, Judicial Review is the only formal challenge available. Cost, complexity and risk put that beyond the reach of ordinary people. That structural imbalance is what FLG exists to fix. Gary and his team will carry the legal work. What it needs now is funding and every one of us willing to step forward. If you have been let down by your bank, your insurer, the service that was supposed to protect you, today matters. If you have waited years and run out of time and fight before getting an answer, today matters. The system relied on all of us staying isolated. On each person breaking before anything changed. We are no longer isolated. @TheFCA @stevemiddi1 @Victoria_Rixon @JohnCleese @MLorrM @ClareCraigPath @drcmday @sharmilaxx @nw_nicholas @DrAseemMalhotra @premnsikka @johnmcdonnellMP

HMRC IS SHUTTING DOWN BUSINESSES THAT HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG. TWO INSIDERS JUST TOLD ME HOW BAD IT REALLY IS. Gary Smith is CEO and Legal Director at Meridian Legal Services. Ian Sutton is a former senior HMRC tax inspector who now runs VATable, a company based in Cardiff that helps businesses fight HMRC debt and repayment disputes. Both of them reached out to me this week. What they described should be on every front page in the country. It isn't. Here is what is happening in simple terms. HMRC has the legal power to file something called a winding-up petition against a business. Think of it as HMRC asking a court to forcibly shut your company down and liquidate it. The moment that petition is advertised publicly, your bank sees it, your suppliers see it, your customers see it. The damage to your business starts before you even get to court. In a single year, the number of winding-up petitions filed by HMRC surged from 1,414 to 36,686. That is not a targeted crackdown on fraudsters. That is an institution running enforcement at industrial scale with almost no public scrutiny. Some of the businesses being hit are solvent. They are not failing. They are not fraudulent. They are viable, functioning companies with employees and customers. HMRC is pursuing them anyway. In some of those cases Ian and Gary have seen first-hand, HMRC has already wound the business up before anyone could stop it. Done. Gone. Irreversible harm to owners and their families. Ian's company VATable was set up precisely because this is happening. He and his colleagues spent their careers inside HMRC. They know exactly how the enforcement machine works, what letters mean, what the escalation process looks like, and crucially, where HMRC is overstepping. They now use that knowledge to fight back on behalf of the businesses being targeted. Gary's firm Meridian Legal Services does the legal work to try to recover what HMRC has destroyed. In some cases they win. In others the damage cannot be undone. HMRC has adopted an increasingly aggressive stance on recovering tax debts, and that trend is expected to continue. The government handed HMRC £1.7 billion in the 2025 to hire thousands of new enforcement and debt collection staff. That money is being spent right now. Small businesses across the UK are on the receiving end. If your business has received correspondence from HMRC that feels disproportionate or aggressive, do not ignore it and do not try to handle it alone. Reach out to Ian Sutton at VATable or contact Gary Smith at Meridian Legal Services. These are people who know exactly how this machine works and how to stop it. Other sources: Tax Expert | Bishop Fleming | Public Accounts Committee @G8GWS @premnsikka @TransparencyTF

FOS EXPOSED IN UK PARLIAMENT Financial Ombudsman Service is the body the public is told to trust when banks, lenders and financial firms get things wrong. It is supposed to protect consumers, sort out complaints fairly, and help people get redress when they have been misled or badly treated. So it should be able to answer the most basic questions about its own backlog and delays. On 27 February 2024, the @CommonsTreasury questioned the Financial Ombudsman Service @financialombuds. The session was chaired by Harriett Baldwin @hbaldwin. Abby Thomas appeared as Chief Executive and Chief Ombudsman. During the hearing, Dame Angela Eagle @angelaeagle pressed FOS on the backlog of fractional timeshare complaints. What makes this so alarming is how simple the questions were. - How many cases were still stuck. - How many people were still waiting. - Why people had still not been paid. FOS could not answer those questions. When pushed on why people had still not got their money back, she did not give a straight answer. That is what should worry people. This was not a difficult ambush. These were basic public-interest questions from @UKParliament. This was the head of the body that is meant to protect consumers. Yet the answers were vague and wrapped in process instead of clarity. It gets worse. After the hearing, the Treasury Committee had to write back and ask for the numbers that were missing. If the ombudsman cannot answer simple questions under scrutiny, is it really fit to protect the public at all?