FOS has published data on consumer complaints it handled between 1 July and 31 December 2011. The data includes both the number of complaints received about inpidual businesses and the percentage of complaints the ombudsman service upheld in favour of consumers. During this six-month period, it received a total of 106,193 new complaints. 89% of the total number of cases involved 163 financial businesses. Of the data published, 46,700 cases related to PPI – a decrease of 53% on the number of cases received in the first half of 2011. This reflects the impact of the FSA’s special arrangements, allowing banks more time to deal with their backlogs of cases following their unsuccessful legal challenge on PPI complaint handling. However, FOS notes that it expects to receive a record 165,000 PPI complaints in 2012/2013. The data also shows that complaints about mortgages have increased by 38%, while investment-related complaints have increased by 5%.. Five financial services groups had more than 6,000 complaints each referred to FOS, which together accounted for 55,241 cases – over half of all the new complaints received by the ombudsman during this six-month period. FOS also notes that it upheld an average of 72% of complaints in favour of consumers, compared to 47% in the first half of 2011 – reflecting the impact of PPI cases. Across the 163 inpidual businesses included in the complaints data, the overall uphold rates varied substantially between 6% and 98% upheld in favour of consumers. For PPI cases specifically, uphold rates ranged between 6% and 100%. (28/02/12)

This 100th edition features four guest editors (journalists from the Sunday Times, Which? Money and Money Marketing, the head of external affairs at CML) who discuss their views on complaints-handling in the wider context of customer service in the financial services sector and choose their “personal favourites” from all the case studies published in Ombudsman News. In addition, the “top 10” questions from readers are set out.

OFT has published its response to the above, which is in the form of a letter to BIS/BERR.

FOS has published the text of a provisional decision upholding a consumer's complaint about a bank's advice to invest in AIG funds, which sets out its general approach to this kind of case.

FOS has published a feedback document in respect of its September 2011 discussion paper. We published publishing ombudsman decisions: next steps in September 2011 – in response to FOS notes that stakeholders were largely supportive of its approach, but the issue that generated the most debate was whether the names of financial businesses should be published. FOS says that its current view is that the overall way forward that was proposed is broadly in the right direction, but will be subject to any operational and practical questions being resolved. FOS intends to discuss “certain issues” with businesses and consumer groups, before finalising how it will implement publication. It plans to maintain this dialogue with stakeholders as the Financial Services Bill progresses through Parliament. Depending on Parliament’s eventual conclusions, FOS intends to set out in detail later in the year its formal responses to all of the points raised and explain how it intends to publish decisions.

Text of the above, given at a BBA conference, follows. Tony Boorman discusses how he sees FOS working with FCA in future and argues that “a fresh look at conduct regulation and redress is overdue … I think we should acknowledge the breakdown in trust around fair complaint handling … surprising as it may seem, PPI is an area where I see real opportunity for partnership working. PPI is certainly not a problem that’s going to go away any time soon. It might be a good place to start re-building trust and a new partnership between consumers and financial businesses”.

FOS has published a technical note on how it approaches complaints in respect of debt collecting.

Topics include: recent disputes involving debt; complaints about personal accident insurance; complaint figures for the third quarter of the 2011/2012 financial year; and proposed new arrangements for charging financial businesses case fees.

NAO has published this report, commissioned by the FOS board. It concludes that FOS needs to achieve efficiencies of scale in order to deal with the highly volatile demand that it will continue to face in the future and argues that it should better use the data it has on the distributions of elapsed times for resolving cases to understand and quantify which elements of the process are causing delays in processing times and consequently where efficiencies need to be made. It notes that FOS has put in place an ambitious change programme to address such challenges and says that FOS should be pleased with its progress to date. However, FOS should strengthen some elements of its programme management arrangements, such as the monitoring of both benefits and unintended impacts of change, and budget control. FOS has also published an accompanying statement, welcoming the findings.