³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

Hello again. I've just about recovered from our in Manchester last Wednesday, and my many broadcasts across many media. (Recovering from the excitement, you understand; let's not pretend that what I do is hard work ...)

Some people have left messages on my Facebook page, saying they enjoyed seeing me back on Breakfast TV. Thank you for your kind words - though I've a nagging doubt that some of you may also be Working Lunch viewers trying to drop a hint!*

What we're really thankful for - as Naga said in the newsletter on Friday - is your terrific, tremendous, enthusiastic response. Hundreds of people turned up at the Trafford Centre for advice. Many more who couldn't make it emailed their questions in advance. We're all so grateful that you took the time and trouble.

There's clearly an enormous demand out there for financial information.

Strikingly, the biggest queues by far were of people wanting advice about their savings. This doesn't surprise anyone on the Working Lunch team; we're well aware that more of you are savers than borrowers, and we try to select the items for the programme accordingly. But it's always useful to have the reminder - it helps us stay focused on your needs.

So we're talking about savings at the start of the programme today.

You've been telling us for months that you're frustrated by the tiny amounts of interest you're earning on your nest egg.

And you're angry about it too - you think policymakers, in their eagerness to kick-start the economy, pander to borrowers and ignore savers. You feel you're paying the price for other people's imprudence.

Is it possible that some of you have decided - enough is enough?

Britain's banks tell us today that savers have withdrawn the largest sums of money from their accounts since they started keeping these records 12 years ago.

Some of this will be down to people repairing their finances after all our Christmas spending. We often see people dip into their savings in January to pay off their credit card debts.

But the numbers suggest this time is different.

The previous record for monthly withdrawals was £1.5 billion.

Last month - we took £2.3 billion out of our bank accounts.

So where is it going? Well, we'd like you to tell us. Some of you have already made your suggestions on .

If you've taken your money out to make it work harder elsewhere, we might be able to help. Savings expert David Black joins us with the latest suggestions on where to find the best rates.

He thinks the banks might start offering slightly better savings rates soon - but only for tax efficient ISA accounts, or for people opening monthly or regular savings accounts.

So the best deals might be for people who put aside little but often. That's good for people who want to start the savings habit, but my hunch is that for many WL viewers, it's as useful as a chocolate tea pot.

Brew up in time for 1.30pm.

* Unfortunately we don't have an "ironic" typeface for the blogs, so I should point out that this is an attempt at a joke. Such as it is.

Social networks - the great race.

Well, perhaps not great, but I was mildly tickled by it.

I mentioned earlier this morning - both on Twitter and on Facebook - that our main guest today will be Neville Richardson, chief executive of the Britannia Building Society.

A short time later, there were a dozen questions for him on Twitter.

On Facebook - virtual tumbleweed.

(OK. When I said interesting, everything is relative.)

We'll ask him some of the things you say are important - should mutuals (businesses owned by their customers) have a stronger role in saving and lending? How does the banking industry become more restrained and responsibility in its lending, without choking off the essential flow of cash to businesses and consumers? Have we - as individuals - become too addicted to debt?

And we'll not forget to ask him why he wants to merge the Britannia with the Co-op.

Thanks for your all those Tweets and questions.

Thanks also to everyone who has been commenting on this blog.

"Mesmerizingcommenter" echoes those concerns about job centres that I mentioned yesterday. There have been some angry articles and letters in the papers, suggesting they may not be able to deal with a large number of newly-unemployed bankers, professionals and office workers.

"Mesmerizingcommenter" notes "staff just don't know what to do with anyone with qualifications ... This time around it's going to be lots of highly skilled workers without the safety net of community housing, worrying about paying their mortgages."

(By the way, I hope this reassures you that I DO read the comments, after your suggestion a few weeks ago that I don't!!)

We've had a few emails from people asking - what about the self-employed? When the media mentions unemployment, it tends to focus on staff and salaried workers; that's partly because the coverage focuses on announced lay-offs and redundancies. You're right to raise it as a concern. We're going to do something about it over the next month.

And one quick statistical point. "Hambrook" suggests I gave you the wrong unemployment figure in yesterday's blog. Comment reads - "1.25 million. I thought it was 1.97 million... "

As I wrote in the original blog, 1.25 million is the number of people on the dole - the number of people claiming unemployment benefit. The other figure - 1.97 million - is the number of people out of work, whether or not they're claiming any benefit.

That latter figure is the current Government-preferred measurement of unemployment, but it was only adopted as the official standard in 1997. The former figure - the claimant count - was the measure of unemployment throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

I used the claimant count figure to make sure that, when comparing this recession to the last one, I'm comparing apples with apples.

Declan

I caused a flurry by mentioning on Twitter and on my Facebook page that I had been to the local Job Centre to sign on.

Some of you were alarmed - or perhaps relieved. You thought Naga had finally taken charge / done the dirty on me / been recognised as the superior talent she is ( * delete as applicable).

Others spotted fairly quickly that this bit of attention-grabbing didn't quite tell the whole story.

Yes I was at the local job centre. But it was to make a report on what you need to do to sign on, rather than to claim unemployment benefit myself.

Unfortunately, the job centre is a place more and more people will have to visit in the months ahead.

The latest unemployment figures out this morning - show nearly 1.25 million people are now on the dole queue.

And the Bank of England has warned that the recession may be a lot worse than expected. It now thinks the economy could shrink by as much as 4 percent this year.

Which means - almost certainly - more lay-offs and redundancies. And more people visiting the dole office.

Some of those people claiming benefits will be visiting a job centre for the first time - or for the first time in a long time.

If my visit yesterday is anything to go by, it may not be as you expect.

When I last signed on - just after the last recession - there were long queues of people waiting to claim, or waiting to speak to advisers, or just waiting.

Even if you've never been inside yourself, you'll know what it looked like. You saw it in the news reports about unemployment in the early 90s and early 80s. You saw it during "The Full Monty" that film about unemployed Sheffield steel workers turned male strippers.

The modern job centre looks more like a building society than a grim bureaucratic shell.

The first thing you see is the welcome desk, where staff direct people to the advisers they need to see. The lobby is dotted with phones and computer terminals, so people can follow up job enquiries.

Behind all that stretches the open-plan office, divided by screens and partitions to provide a bit of privacy for "customers" meeting advisers.

And the racks of cards displaying the latest vacancies have been swept away, replaced by touch-screen "job points" so you can search for vacancies in the local area or across the country, in all trades or just your own.

Queues - officials insisted - are shorter, where they exist at all. Certainly, while I saw lots of people in the building I visited yesterday, few seemed to be waiting.

That's partly because you have to do quite a bit of homework before you arrive at the job centre.

If you lose your job, you don't just turn up unannounced to make your claim. The first thing you do is phone the Job Centre Plus helpline (the number is 0800 0 55 66 88).

They'll give you a date and time to visit your local job centre to discuss your claim, and how you might get back to work.

The call centre staff will also take some personal details and work out what benefits you might be able to claim.

If you've paid enough in National Insurance Contributions, you'll probably qualify for what we used to call Unemployment Benefit. Nowadays, in the jargon it's the less-snappy Contribution-based Job Seekers Allowance.

Otherwise you may be able to get the benefit that used to be known as Income Support - now renamed Income-based Job Seekers Allowance.

You may also be able to claim additional help with your mortgage, your council tax bill, the cost of prescriptions and dental treatment, or school meals.

Full details are available online at the Job Centre Plus website

The job centre staff I chatted to yesterday - many of them in the business for decades - say they're much better suited to cope with an economic slowdown now than they were in the 1990s.

They say their focus is on individual needs, not civil service procedure. And they say they have better links with businesses that need staff.

But there have been reports in some newspapers that job centres are struggling to cope with a rising tide of unemployed office workers, bankers and service staff. Angry articles have been written by frustrated professionals turned job seekers, who feel job centre staff don't understand the jobs they used to do - or what they need to get back to work.

As unemployment rises, their big test is yet to come. We'd be interested to hear your experiences.

Goodness, but the banks are taking a lot of flak.

As I type, we're all listening to the former bosses of RBS and HBOS being skewered by a panel of MPs.

An astonished "ooh" went up in our newsroom when RBS chiefs said it was an "error" and a "bad mistake" buying its Dutch rival ABN Amro.

No doubt there will be other juicy admissions as the hearing continues.

But MPs having a go at bankers is one thing. Celebrities having a pop at them is quite another.

The TV chef Antony Worrall Thompson got a lot of attention over the weekend when he blamed Lloyds for the collapse of his business.

His holding company, AWT Restaurants, was put into the hands of administrators last Friday. Four restaurants have shut down. He bought control of two others, using his own personal savings.

He said he had to bring the shutters down because the bank wouldn't lend him the money he needed to keep going. As he told us yesterday, he's feeling pretty sore about it - as he thinks they were perfectly healthy businesses.

But many of you are less than sympathetic. You think Mr Worrall Thompson is being unfair to the bank, because he wouldn't put his money where his mouth was.

Mr Worrall Thompson declined to use his house or his personal wealth to secure new bank loans.

Jim in Aberdeen asks, if he was so confident about his business, "why was he not confident enough to pledge his house" against the loan? Jim says this is something many entrepreneurs have to do to get the funding they need to build their businesses; they literally have to bet the house.

Barry agrees. "I see no reason why Lloyds should take on the risk," he says.

Roger accuses us of giving the TV chef "an easy ride". "What about all the creditors who have lost money?" he asks. "Many of them will have been struggling small businesses."

If you missed it, you can see what Mr Worrall Thompson had to say for himself elsewhere on the Working Lunch website.

The relationship between the banks and small businesses is a topic we're returning to today.

Research from the CBI published just yesterday said two-thirds of business owners are already struggling to get credit, and think the flow of money will be squeezed still further.

The banks, meanwhile, insist they're lending more now than they were in recent months.

We'll hear today from a young entrepreneur called Tom Acland. He has set up a fleet of mobile coffee vans that visit industrial estates, call centres and business parks. Despite the recession, he's expecting turnover to grow sharply again this year.

When we told him what the bank bosses had said in Parliament this morning, he said their apologies were nice to hear, but were not enough.

I'm guessing he's not the banks' biggest fan then. Hear what else he's got to say at 1230.