IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Money and Mental Health Chief Executive awarded OBE in New Years Honour List
29 December 2025
Helen Undy, Chief Executive of the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, has been made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the New Years Honour List.
Helen has received this honour for her contribution to voluntary services, including her leadership of the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, a research charity set up by Martin Lewis CBE (Money Saving Expert) in 2016 with the aim of breaking the link between financial difficulty and mental health problems.
Helen was a member of the charity’s founding team, and became Chief Executive in 2018. Under her leadership, the organisation has had considerable impact in driving policy and systems change to address the drivers of poor mental health and financial problems. The organisation’s achievements in this period include:
- Successfully campaigning for the government to introduce the Mental Health Crisis Breathing Space scheme, which offers people experiencing a mental health crisis a break from escalating fees, charges and collections activity on their debts while they focus on recovery.
- Bringing an end to GP charges for paperwork people with mental health problems need to get extra help from creditors
- Working as part of a cross-sector coalition to secure new consumer protections against online scams in the Online Safety Bill
- Persuading government to crack down on aggressive debt collection practices
- Launching its innovative Mental Health Accessible and Gambling Harms Action Lab programmes, through which it works directly with essential services such as banks to make their services more accessible and to improve support for customers at risk of gambling harms
- Securing ‘Supercomplainant’ status with the Competition and Markets Authority – the government’s consumer watchdog – giving Money and Mental Health special powers to highlight examples of consumer harm and to spur regulatory action.
In 2025 Helen served in the Treasury’s Financial Inclusion Committee, playing a key role in shaping the Government’s Financial Inclusion Strategy, which brought a number of important measures to make financial services more accessible to people with mental health problems.
Before joining Money and Mental Health, Helen worked as a parliamentary aide and led Mind’s policy and campaigns work on public mental health and social care. More details on her professional biography can be found here.
Martin Lewis CBE (Money Saving Expert), Chair and Founder of the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, said: “I’m delighted for Helen both personally and on behalf of the charity. As Money and Mental Health is a policy charity, many of the millions of people with mental health issues who Helen and the team’s work have helped will be completely unaware of it.
“They won’t know that Money and Mental Health is behind the fact their bank now treats them better and puts them through to a mental health trained member of staff, nor that it’s the charity’s work that means they can now block gambling transactions on their card, or that it’s behind the government embedding debt help within the NHS. The silent graft behind all this is one of the reasons I’m so pleased Helen is getting the recognition she deserves.
“She is one of those rare people who can bring together passion for the cause, a talent to get things done, an intellectual ability to handle the most demanding policies and a people skills to persuade others. She’s given me an easy job as Chair of the charity, as I know whatever we come up with she will follow through with tenacity, aplomb. What wonderful news.”
Helen Undy, Chief Executive of the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, said: “I‘m delighted, and honestly a little bit embarrassed, to be awarded this honour. Life has dealt me a lucky hand which enables me to do this work and lead an incredible charity. So I accept this recognition on behalf of the many thousands of people living with money and mental health problems who have not always been so fortunate, and who are at the heart of our work.
“Ten years ago the links between money and mental health problems were rarely even considered, and I’d like to pay tribute to the exceptional team at Money and Mental Health, past and present, who have changed that for good. If this award serves a purpose, I hope it is to open more doors, build momentum, and take our work further than ever.”
ENDS
Contact:
For all media enquiries, please contact Brian Semple, Head of External Affairs, on 0207 848 1448 or [email protected]
Notes to Editors
About the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute:
The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute is an independent charity set up by Martin Lewis, and committed to breaking the link between financial difficulty and mental health problems. We conduct research, develop practical policy solutions and work in partnership with both those providing services and those using them to find what really works. www.moneyandmentalhealth.org