Do you trust Financial Ombudsman?

eskbanker

OceanSound wrote: »

I've made about 10 complaints in the last 8 years. Sometimes Ombudsman service has been good. e.g. 1st ever complaint I made they asked Homeserve to pay for a replacement oven and compensation for worry. I've been successful after complaining about the likes of Halifax and HSBC as well.

However, there's been some awful decisions. (I know..I know..Sour grapes and all that). One was about Paypal the other was about Bank of Ceylon. Both were pretty clear cut, however, Ombudsman said 'business had done nothing wrong'.

It must be said that 10 complaints in 8 years is disproportionately high (in the context of total annual volumes running at 320-340K, from circa 50m UK adults), so it's perhaps unsurprising that as a serial complainer, you're going to be more disappointed than most.

OceanSound wrote: »

You have more chance of success:
a) If you are complaining about some products/services (categories) than others. e.g. PPI claims generally have more chance of success than 'banking and credit'.
b) with some businesses than others. i.e. success with certain businesses are near impossible. e.g. Paypal, HSBC.

It's hardly surprising that different categories have different upholding rates! Your assertion about HSBC isn't backed up by the facts, which state that the overall 'upheld in consumer favour' rate for complaints against HSBC is above the average, at 35% versus 34% across all business (although their significantly higher PPI success rate does distort this).

Interestingly for those who see building societies as more ethical than banks, the upheld rate for Coventry Building Society in the last six months of 2017 was a nice round 0%! They don't specify how many complaints this refers to, but 140 were added to the pile over the same period so it's unlikely to be a completely trivial number.

OceanSound wrote: »

Anyone looking at the statistics on the FOS website should realise that they don't tell the whole story (if you don't look at the stats together). e.g. the '% resolved in favour of consumer' figure includes PPI claims. So, inflates this overall figure.

I'd suggest that anyone expecting stats to tell the whole story about anything would be well advised to exercise common sense and read and analyse carefully! The (ex-Plevin) PPI uphold rate in 2017/18 (36%) is slightly above the overall average (34%), but not massively so, and the individual figures by category are readily available for anyone interested....

OceanSound wrote: »

ALso, the 'upheld' figure does not include cases where a business has settled (by way of compensation) with the complainant before any decision is made by FOS. Many businesses do settle this way. This is how come the 'upheld in favour of consumer' will never reach 80% -90% or over.

Their data states that they measure their upheld rates based on cases "that resulted in a change in outcome in favour of the consumer (comparing the financial business's response to the consumer's complaint and the final outcome after our involvement)" which suggests to me that they would include cases where the business settles after FOS is involved even if not formally directed to do so.

OceanSound wrote: »

If I had a pound for every time I heard someone say 'FOS is an impartial, independent, unbiased adjudicator of complaints', I'd be a millionaire!

If you had a pound for every time you complained you'd be doing alright!

JuicyJesus

eskbanker wrote: »

It must be said that 10 complaints in 8 years is disproportionately high (in the context of total annual volumes running at 320-340K, from circa 50m UK adults), so it's perhaps unsurprising that as a serial complainer, you're going to be more disappointed than most.

Yeah that stood out to me. I've probably had that many complaints to banks and other firms overall since 2010, possibly more, but I've had exactly one that was serious enough and that I disagreed enough at the outcome to take to FOS - 10 complaints that required escalation to FOS is frankly weird. You'd have to be either incredibly unlucky, have insanely high standards for organisations you deal with such that no offer of redress they could make is adequate or simply want to escalate to FOS vexatiously.

dunstonh

The Plevin issue is a strange one as the FOS consider a Plevin outcome as an upheld complaint. Even though Plevin only applies to rejected complaints. i.e. someone refers their rejected PPI complaint to the FOS. if the FOS dont uphold the complaint but a Plevin payout is made, then it is considered upheld because there is a payment.

OceanSound

Relax you lot. 10 complaints in 8 years isn't all that much. It's an average of 1.25 complaints a year (note the decimal place). 12.5 complaints a year on the other hand would be a lot!.

Anyway, 1 of those 10 complaints were made on behalf of my dad (the HomeServe complaint). There was also a complaint about Santander (refusing to release Dormancy block) which was split in to two (making two complaints handled together).

I admire you chaps loyalty in defending the establishment. However, you can only brush so much dirt under the carpet. Some of it is going to seep out and show eventually, as it did recently, when FOS was investigated by the 'dispatches' TV program, the chief ombudsman Caroline Wayman was hauled before a parliamentary select committee. The whole debacle revealed that some untrained adjudicators were using google to learn about products and churning their view based on these.
Honestly, try and search outside these forums and you will see for yourselves. I'm not making this up.

eskbanker

OceanSound wrote: »

Relax you lot. 10 complaints in 8 years isn't all that much. It's an average of 1.25 complaints a year (note the decimal place). 12.5 complaints a year on the other hand would be a lot!.

My point was that in factual terms it's disproportionately high - the average is somewhat less than 0.01 complaints per year per UK adult, so a sustained period of exceeding this by two orders of magnitude is clearly unusual.

OceanSound wrote: »

I admire you chaps loyalty in defending the establishment. However, you can only brush so much dirt under the carpet. Some of it is going to seep out and show eventually, as it did recently, when FOS was investigated by the 'dispatches' TV program, the chief ombudsman Caroline Wayman was hauled before a parliamentary select committee. The whole debacle revealed that some untrained adjudicators were using google to learn about products and churning their view based on these.
Honestly, try and search outside these forums and you will see for yourselves. I'm not making this up.

I can't speak for anyone else but I'm not defending FOS at all, but simply pointing out some of the flaws in your argument. As you say, a muck-raking documentary did indeed find some evidence of untrained staff and so on, but in itself that doesn't necessarily signify that an organisation is fundamentally untrustworthy or that its adjudications are significantly inaccurate.

dunstonh

Relax you lot. 10 complaints in 8 years isn't all that much. It's an average of 1.25 complaints a year (note the decimal place). 12.5 complaints a year on the other hand would be a lot!.

With your stats, you are probably in the top 5% of complainers in the country. It is disproportionately high. This is not to take away from your right to use a service. However, someone suffering the level of dissatisfaction you are reporting possibly is never going to be happy.

Some of it is going to seep out and show eventually, as it did recently, when FOS was investigated by the 'dispatches' TV program, the chief ombudsman Caroline Wayman was hauled before a parliamentary select committee. The whole debacle revealed that some untrained adjudicators were using google to learn about products and churning their view based on these.
Honestly, try and search outside these forums and you will see for yourselves. I'm not making this up.

Yet no evidence of a widespread problem was found to support the allegations raised by that programme. You are always going to get individual cases in any walk of life. And the programme made a big presumption. It assumed that every error favoured the firms.

There was a case not too many years back where an adjudicator was found to be upholding every case against a particular firm because he had some grudge against it. As it was the financial firm that had been victim and not the consumer, the FOS couldnt go back over the old cases and change the decisions and consumers had already received the money. Whereas had it been the other way around, the FOS would have reviewed the decisions and changed them where appropriate.

I admire you chaps loyalty in defending the establishment.

The problem when you have a biased position and are closed minded on an issue is that you see a balanced discussion as defensive.

OceanSound

eskbanker wrote: »

...I can't speak for anyone else but I'm not defending FOS at all, but simply pointing out some of the flaws in your argument.

The unusually high number of complaints is not a flaw in an argument. Actually, it's a strategy used to attack the personality (of a person making an argument) not the argument per se.

... the average is somewhat less than 0.01 complaints per year per UK adult, so a sustained period of exceeding this by two orders of magnitude is clearly unusual.

You are quoting a number here, without any evidence or a source. What demographic are we talking about here?, is your figure based on a representative sample of the UK?. Do certain demographics make more complaints than others?...think about these before just quoting a barebone figure that apply on 'average'.

As you say, a muck-raking documentary did indeed find some evidence of untrained staff and so on, but in itself that doesn't necessarily signify that an organisation is fundamentally untrustworthy or that its adjudications are significantly inaccurate.

'muck-raking documentary' is your opinion. Others may feel it's a good current affairs programme that does wonders for investigative journalism. Anyway,I think you are falling in to the same trap here of criticizing the messenger and NOT properly grappling with the argument.

JuicyJesus

Anyone else getting the impression that OP complains about literally everything and anything in order to get one back at the "establishment" and is upset that FOS isn't going along with this crusade?

Reading between the lines it seems likely. Unless they'd like to post some of the DRNs of Ombudsman's final decisions, which are publicly available in an anonymised form, so that we can see exactly what they were complaining about and why FOS rejected them.

In any event, the number of complaints referred to FOS is very related, because someone with such a high number of referrals is very different from the norm and it therefore implies that there is something peculiar to that person that is causing them, which is also likely to inform their attitude to FOS in and of itself. Either astonishingly poor luck or, as it increasingly appears, a chip on their shoulder.

dunstonh

'muck-raking documentary' is your opinion. Others may feel it's a good current affairs programme that does wonders for investigative journalism.

Really? You ask anyone who has seen these programmes cover their profession and they will tell you of the programme errors, bad assumptions, editing to tell a story etc.

deadendwaterfall

dunstonh wrote: »

With your stats, you are probably in the top 5% of complainers in the country. It is disproportionately high. This is not to take away from your right to use a service. However, someone suffering the level of dissatisfaction you are reporting possibly is never going to be happy.



Yet no evidence of a widespread problem was found to support the allegations raised by that programme. You are always going to get individual cases in any walk of life. And the programme made a big presumption. It assumed that every error favoured the firms.

There was a case not too many years back where an adjudicator was found to be upholding every case against a particular firm because he had some grudge against it. As it was the financial firm that had been victim and not the consumer, the FOS couldnt go back over the old cases and change the decisions and consumers had already received the money. Whereas had it been the other way around, the FOS would have reviewed the decisions and changed them where appropriate.



The problem when you have a biased position and are closed minded on an issue is that you see a balanced discussion as defensive.

Don't the FOS have the right to contact anyone who has received the money already demanding they pay it back or else?