Ombudsman won't look at my complaint !

gforster

I'll try and keep this brief.

I was missold PPI on a car loan by a garage in 2007.
I was told I had to have it for a year in order to get the loan and so after 12 months cancelled it.
I then found that this was a lie and they had effectively cheated me out of the money so i wrote to the garage to complain in 2008, they replied to my letter to say that they were professional etc etc and would never do that blah blah and put on the letter that this was their full and final response.

Having recently found this forum I realised that I did have a case to take this further filled in the official form and sent it off to them. They duly returned it to me stating that the matter had been closed in 2008, I then wrote to the FOS and asked them to take up the complaint.

They have replied to me today to say that because the garage have a letter written to me that says full and final response on it and it's more than 6 months ago that they won't look at the complaint unless I can come up with an exceptional reason as to why I did go to them previously ! Before I even found this forum i didn't know that was even an option !

It is right that I cannot now claim as I wrote a letter of complaint in 2008 ?!

Can anyone advise ?

dunstonh

It is right that I cannot now claim as I wrote a letter of complaint in 2008 ?!

Yes. You get 6 months from the final outcome of the complaint to refer your case to the FOS. After 6 months, the FOS cannot review the complaint unless the firm allow them to voluntarily or you have a good reason for the delay.

magpiecottage

The final response should have made clear that you could refer the matter to FOS and you had six months to do so. You should not have needed to find that out here.

If the final response did not warn you of the six month limit FOS will reopen it but not otherwise.

gforster

OK thats interesting, the letter from 2008 states that if I am not happy I can go to the Ombudsman but at the time I didn't know who they were and thought I would need some form of legal help / advice to take it further.

There is no mention in the letter from the garage of any timescale that we need to adhere to to take this further.

Are you therefore suggesting that this in itself is grounds to ask the ombudsman to reopen the case for me ?

P.S. THANKS SO MUCH for the help and advice I would have given up a long time ago if the people on here were not so supportive and helpful

magpiecottage

gforster wrote: »

There is no mention in the letter from the garage of any timescale that we need to adhere to to take this further.

Are you therefore suggesting that this in itself is grounds to ask the ombudsman to reopen the case for me ?

It is indeed.

Write back to FOS explaining that the reason that you did not complain within six months is that the garage did not tell you to as they can see from the enclosed copy of the response they gave you.

Make sure you hang on to the original, though.