Dear listener,

Hello. Am I addressing Mr/Mrs/Ms Money Box Listener? If “yes” press 1. If “no” press 2. [pause] Thank you for confirming you are Mr/Mrs/Mr Money Box Listener. I am now going to give you some information about the forthcoming programme and what has been happening this week. Press 1 to go ahead. Or 2 to stop wasting your time. [pause] Thank you for confirming… etc. That’s the kind of automated call some banks are using to tell their customers about a debt and ask them to pay it. And they don’t like it. The customers that is.

Back in the real world, I have finally checked and rewritten various tax guides to incorporate the latest allowances and bands after the chancellor’s handbrake turn on the 10p tax band a couple of weeks ago. But now another tax scandal looms. And again it’s low income people – this time retired people – who are going to suffer. More than 400,000 could see their tax bills double for a year, to recover the tax which the Revenue failed to collect in 2007/08. Some would pay £440 tax on a pension of just £1000 a year! Can it be allowed? Is that the distant sound of screeching tyres? Or just cries of despair? Find out in the programme.

What does “personal reserve” mean to you? The demeanour shown by someone who is a bit shy? A couple of bottles of good wine that you save for special friends? Or an automatic overdraft facility which will cost £22, if you use it for up to five days? The last of course – at least if you’re a Barclays customer. Intended to deal with end-of-month syndrome when those annoying bills arrive just before payday, the personal reserve will cut in automatically on all current accounts from 18 August. And if it is not enough, then the cost of bouncing a payment will plummet from £35 to just £8 a time. Nothing to do, of course, with the pending court case on the fairness of overdraft charges.

Transparency as a Regulatory Tool is the enticing title of a report from the Financial Services Authority about telling consumers some of the useful information which the regulator currently keeps secret from us. One radical suggestion is that it should publish league tables of the top 400 companies showing how many complaints they get, how quickly they deal with them, what proportion are decided in favour of the customer, and how much redress they pay. Radical stuff. The banks tell us why they want to keep that information to themselves.

A record number of complaints are being dealt with by the Financial Ombudsman. A record number of complaints is being dealt with by the Financial Ombudsman. Press “1” if you prefer “are” in that sentence. Press “2” if you prefer “is”. I’m old enough to have done grammar at school and I still don’t know. Anyway, as endowment complaints dry up, complaints about bank charges and payment protection insurance come back in spades. So the poor old Ombudsman is busier than ever. Press 1,2,3,0,8,9 for the number of complaints received in 2007/08.

I’ll stop now so we can try to squeeze that litre of news into the 568ml pot that is our allotted span. Hear if we succeed on Money Box - live on Saturday at noon and repeated on Sunday at nine pm. If that doesn’t suit you then go online and listen when you like. Or get the podcast. Or better still subscribe so you get it every week. That is freedom!

Best wishes

Paul Lewis

PS Don’t forget the live preview of Money Box on BBC1 Breakfast between 8.45 and 9 on Saturday morning.

e-mail Paul Lewis