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FOS vs Small Claims
Comments
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I know several people that have worked at the FOS but they were all Ombudsman not investigators and most were also Fellows of the Institute of Actuaries (before they went to the FOS). Obviously a very different kettle of fish when you come in as an expert not just someone reeasonable at customer service that then needs to be trained on the subject mater.
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The OP keeps referencing the 30% FOS cases determined in favour of the consumer as an indicator of failing.
AIUI, the FOS is more likely to find in favour of the consumer than a court would if presented with the same facts. The court has to follow the law strictly whereas the FOS can apply more discretion.
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I have over 30 years experience.
I am an Independent Financial Adviser (IFA). The comments I make are just my opinion and are for discussion purposes only. They are not financial advice and you should not treat them as such. If you feel an area discussed may be relevant to you, then please seek advice from an Independent Financial Adviser local to you.1 -
I said as much as well - an uphold rate is pointless without knowing the details and rejection reasons
Say 100 people complain
20 are time barred (FOS cannot do anything except reject)
10 are vexatious (complaints as "revenge" on the bank for doing something the FOS cannot change)
10 are commercial decisions by the bank e.g. to close an account as the bank don't want them
10 are people who took out too much debt and are trying it on with an unaffordable lending complaint
10 are complaints they didn't get the advertised rate on a finance product
10 are areas the FOS don't cover e.g. unregulated finance
30 were genuine problems
That is 30% uphold rate but 70% of cases were rejected not because the FOS is biased but because they couldn't do anything else
If you look at the FOS breakdown
Things like mini-bonds (85%), SIPP (77%), help to buy (64%) have a much higher uphold rate. Indeed, the first 6 pages (60 types of classification) all have higher than 30%. Yet something like PPI is only 11% (presumably down to so many being time barred)
Sam Vimes' Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness:
People are rich because they spend less money. A poor man buys $10 boots that last a season or two before he's walking in wet shoes and has to buy another pair. A rich man buys $50 boots that are made better and give him 10 years of dry feet. The poor man has spent $100 over those 10 years and still has wet feet.
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In terms of percentages, they used to publish this:
Fewer than one in six of the initial complaints and enquiries we receive to our front-line customer helpline become chargeable cases. The other complaints and enquiries usually involve issues that we don’t deal with – or where we can sort things out informally at a very early stage.
but I don't recall seeing a similar stat in more recent times - if they're still dismissing ~85% without actually considering their merits via an investigation case then that would obviously imply that the uphold rate is measured as a percentage of valid complaints…
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Is it "dismissing.. without actually considering their merits" if they get a call from someone where they do not cover the case or they can confirm there is a legal time bar they cannot process, or they can help the customer with a simple fix or indeed, if the customer hasn't complained to the bank and is trying to go directly to the FOS.
Sam Vimes' Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness:
People are rich because they spend less money. A poor man buys $10 boots that last a season or two before he's walking in wet shoes and has to buy another pair. A rich man buys $50 boots that are made better and give him 10 years of dry feet. The poor man has spent $100 over those 10 years and still has wet feet.
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That's certainly how I'd interpret their reference to the those that don't become chargeable cases, but happy to be corrected - all of their statistical reporting is based on the number of complaints they receive and the 2025/26 volume of 214,872 would seem to correlate roughly with their fee income. Having said that, they also report 316,675 new enquiries, which would suggest only about a third failing to become chargeable cases in 2025/26, rather than the ~85% in 2017…
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The important bit is that the old value included enquiries not just registered complaints; Im not sure that if someone calls and gets told to make a complaint with the company first its necessarily tracked if they then 10 weeks later register a complaint online
The uphold rate is of formal complaints that arent immediately rejected for jurisdictional issues (eg unregulated firms, out of time etc) so the example above with out of time being part of the percentage wouldnt normally be true.
The rates can change a lot year on year/ quarter on quarter depending very much what is the flavour of the month. The year just completed was 30%, the year before was 34%, Guarantor Loans for instance went from 32% upheld one year to 89% the next and down to 40% the following.0 -
but we do not now what they complaints are about? That is all guesswork, we can only go on the facts we know. For all we know 90% of the complaints are true, genuine, strong complaints (unlikely) and 10% are rubbish. We just dont know so we can only go by the facts we do know
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