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Financial Ombudsman Receives Record Complaints

Financial Ombudsman Receives Record Complaints The chairman of the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has said that his watchdog received a record number of complaints last year.

FOS chairman, Sir Christopher Kelly said, “By the end of the 2007-08 financial year we had received more new complaints than in any year since the Ombudsman service was established.”

Sir Christopher added that during this time, the FOS received 123,089 - a 30 per cent increase on the previous 12 months.


A sharp increase in the amount of complaints about bank charges and payment protection insurance (PPI) was behind the rise, with the watchdog receiving some 32,000 between May and August 2007 alone.

This represented a tenfold increase in such complaints from the previous financial year, as consumer anger over such issues rises and more people seek out help to clear debt.

However, most complaints were rejected, except for those concerning bank charges or credit cards, although the Ombudsman stopped taking on any new cases at the end of July, as well as freezing action on current cases.

The move was down to a deal between the Office of Fair Trading and the banks, pending a High Court decision on the issue. Due to this deal, the FOS has frozen some 14,000 complaints about bank charges.

These are now unlikely to be re-examined before late next year, as banks are currently appealing against the initial court decision, which ruled that the OFT had a right to adjudicate on such charges.

For PPI complaints, these shot up in the first quarter of 2008 as campaigns began to raise awareness across the media and among the public, and debts in the UK reach high levels.


Sir Christopher said that the FOS received 10,652 complaints about this issue over the whole of the last financial year, compared to just 1,832 in 2006-7.

Consumer campaigners Which? insist that some two million people could have been mis-sold PPI policies since 2003.

Debt Management News posted on 02 June 2008

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